Mothers and Sons Trattoria

The Restaurant

Mothers and Sons Trattoria opened in 2017 at 107 West Chapel Hill Street, two doors down from chef Matthew Kelly's Mateo Bar de Tapas in the same restored downtown Durham block. The trattoria is a partnership between Kelly and chef Josh Skinny DeCarolis (formerly of the original Magnolia Grill), and the project at Mothers and Sons was always to build the most serious Italian dining room in the Triangle around the discipline of fresh handmade pasta and regional Italian preparations. The dining room seats about seventy across a warm narrow space defined by exposed brick walls, dark hardwood floors, leather banquettes along one side and an open pasta-making counter that runs along the back wall, where the kitchen's small team rolls and cuts the day's pasta in clear view of every diner. The acoustics are calibrated for conversation, the lighting is deliberately low and the table spacing along the banquette is generous enough to protect a first-date conversation without sounding empty.

The menu at Mothers and Sons rotates regularly and is deliberately scaled to handle the small kitchen's daily fresh-pasta operation. The opening section runs through a small antipasti programme: the house-cured charcuterie, the bagna cauda with seasonal vegetables, the burrata with grilled bread and seasonal fruit, the carpaccio. The pasta section is the room's structural centre: typically eight to ten handmade pasta preparations rotated daily, including a recurring agnolotti del plin in brown butter that has become the room's most-photographed plate, a cacio e pepe finished tableside, a daily ragout (often the duck ragu tagliatelle), a seasonal vegetable pasta and a stuffed pasta that DeCarolis runs as a personal monthly project. The larger courses run through a wood-grilled fish, a chicken al mattone, a seasonal braise and a hanger steak with bagna cauda. The desserts (the affogato, the seasonal panna cotta, the warm Nutella budino) are unselfconscious.

The wine list runs to about one hundred and seventy references with a deliberate regional Italian focus: serious depth in Piedmont, Tuscany, Sicily, the Veneto and the Alto Adige, with a careful cross-section of small natural producers across each region. The by-the-glass programme is among the most generous in the Triangle for the diner who wants to try a flight of regional whites or a vertical of Barolo across a small-plate meal. Kelly and DeCarolis themselves rotate through the kitchen most services. The 2025 Michelin Guide American South induction recognised Mothers and Sons in its inaugural North Carolina cohort alongside Mateo and Nanas, all three Kelly properties. For a Durham dinner that wants warm, regional, technically serious Italian cooking without the formality of a tasting room, this is the calibrated answer.