Piccolino is the Santa Fe exception: a family-owned, family-oriented and seriously local place that doesn’t serve New Mexican food. It’s all Italian all the time here. The pages-long menu has every Italian classic you can think of and I found myself wondering if the kitchen staff numbered in the dozens, all invisibly at work concocting sauces and whipping up everything from massive salads to pizzas, pastas and veal three ways, plus dessert. 

Piccolino, in other words, has its act together. And thus we wisely arrived before 5:30 one weekday evening: By six o’clock, it was standing room only in the lobby. Neither the kitchen nor the waitstaff, however, missed a beat in the ensuing hour we enjoyed our supper.