Buon appetito!

I’m a hopelessly old-fashioned romantic when it comes to restaurants. You can have your Bulli, your Noma, your Per Se. When it comes to good food in a warm and welcoming atmosphere of comfort, friendship, and sociability, I’m for little holes-in-the-wall like this one.

Tacconi’s restaurant is only open for lunch, six days a week, and Mrs. Tacconi does all the cooking herself on a comfortable old range in the back–except for the pasta which comes from the shop directly across the street. There are few tables and the fare is plain as plain can be, which  makes it uber-Tuscan.

So you have whatever Mrs. Tacconi has decided to cook that day. Which almost always includes tagliatelle and pici (that’s the “hand-made” flour-and-water pasta from southern Tuscany, shaped into spaghetti-like strings), usually served with a choice of a meaty ragu or a pomodoro sauce. Last week the pici al pomodoro included these brilliantly colored sweet little pomodorini, just arriving in the market from southern Italy. The color was good enough to eat by itself.