Welcome to Italian comfort food season. Move over, salads and dainty shared plates. See you later, tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. This is the time of year for rib-sticking dishes with ballast and bombast. With temperatures plummeting, we wanted to know what some of our favorite Italian restaurants on the North Shore had planned for the chillier months.
Il Ponte, Woburn
At Il Ponte, which opened in 2022 in Woburn, chef Beni Kurti embraces the cooler weather with a series of dishes that are reminiscent of his home region of Umbria, in Italy. One signature dish, a beef short rib, is braised in red and white wine, along with mirepoix—a mix of carrot, onion, and celery—in a 375-degree oven for three hours. “We do a risotto Milanese, which is risotto with fresh saffron,” Kurti says. “We top it with the short rib. We do it with a reduction of the sauce on top, and we braise the cippolini onions, as well, for texture.” On the side, the chef adds a salad of shaved carrots, dressed with a citrus vinaigrette and chives. “It gives them a little tartness,” he says.
Chef Kurti’s short ribs are far from the only comfort food served when the weather grows cold. Gnocchi, made from potatoes, double-zero flour, and egg yolks—and seasoned with nutmeg, salt, and pepper—is served in a tomato sauce with fresh mozzarella. “We sauté it in the sauce and put it in a dish with fresh mozzarella, Parmesan cheese, basil, and we put it in the oven, and we bake it,” he says. The result is a rich and satisfying baked pasta that is among the restaurant’s more popular dishes.
Carmine, Newburyport
Carmine, in Newburyport, opened in the summer of 2021. Gianluca Onofri is the restaurant’s executive chef and owner. A newer dish, which has recently taken off, Onofri says, is a play on the traditional veal Milanese. “It’s these huge, pounded veal scallopini, which are just my grandmother’s breadcrumb and egg crust,” he says. “We do a penne alla vodka. We render some soppresata, and it’s a tomato vodka cream sauce. We make, like, a chicken parm-style out of it.”
Carbonara, a traditional Roman dish, lives on the menu, too, the ultimate Italian soul food. Challenging for cooks because of its use of eggs in the final stages of cooking, Carmine’s version uses both yolks and whites. “It’s delicious,” Onofri says. “It’s a basic recipe: pepper, egg, cheese, and a really nice, spiced guanciale. Sometimes, a little pasta water. And it’s just consistent every time.” The creamy, rich pasta dish is exactly the kind of food that keeps customers coming back when the weather outside is frightful.
Angelo’s, Stoneham
Angelo Caruso, the chef-owner of Angelo’s, in Stoneham, embraces soup-making as the season turns from mild to cold. Most of the soups, he says, change daily, but he has a rotating list of favorites. Pasta e fagioli, a pasta and bean soup, is one of Caruso’s standbys. He uses handmade pappardelle, cut diagonally, as well as dried cannellini beans, cooked directly into the soup. “We’re well known for our chicken soup,” Caruso says. The restaurant produces about 50 gallons every day, adding to the homemade stock pastina or tortellini or rice. It’s served, he says, with fresh chicken meat, pasta, and carrots.
In addition to soups, the restaurant serves hearty cold-weather dishes, like osso bucco—cooked for about three hours in wine with mirepoix and tomato and served with saffron rice—egg yolk-filled pasta with fresh truffles on top, and even wild boar stew.
Tonno, Gloucester
At Tonno, in Gloucester, executive chef Tony Curtis prepares a cioppino—a riff on the legendary San Francisco fish stew that arrived in the United States via Genoese fishermen—that is perfect for the season. The stew features swordfish and cod and, on occasion, halibut. “It’s a nice way to utilize most of the fish that we have in-house,” Curtis says. The stew has a spicy tomato broth base, and is amplified with fennel, white wine, and lemon juice. “We just kind of stew that, and then add in the clams, mussels, and calamari,” Curtis says. It comes served with house-grilled ciabatta that is rubbed with a garlic-infused olive oil and served with a lemon aioli.
One final dish for Italian comfort this season? Chef Curtis recommends Tonno’s short-cut rigatoni with cured duck legs. The legs are cooked confit—slowly, that is, in their own fat—and then served with a brown butter-sage-mascarpone sauce, roasted chestnuts, and a chestnut purée. It comes topped with crispy duck skin. “All of our pastas,” Curtis notes, except for the gluten-free options, “are homemade in house.”
No more comforting words were ever spoken.