Osteria Mattone

The Restaurant

Osteria Mattone opened in 2013 at 1095 Canton Street in a converted Canton-block storefront whose interior was rebuilt to look and feel like a Trastevere trattoria — exposed brick, warm hanging-bulb lighting, a long zinc-topped bar in front of an open wood-fired Neapolitan pizza oven, and a back dining room of about seventy covers arranged on bistro chairs and small marble-topped tables. The restaurant is the work of the same Roswell hospitality group that runs Table & Main two blocks south, and the design idea was simple: an Italian room that takes Rome seriously rather than the suburban red-sauce default.

The kitchen mills pasta flour on premises and the pasta menu turns daily. Fixture plates include the cacio e pepe with hand-pulled tonnarelli, the carbonara with guanciale and Roman pecorino, a daily ravioli composition with a brown-butter-sage sauce, a hand-rolled gnocchi al pomodoro, and an oxtail-and-tomato bucatini that nods to Trastevere's coda alla vaccinara tradition. The Neapolitan pizza oven runs through the lunch and dinner services — about fifteen options including the margherita, a daily white pie, and a seasonal preparation that turns on the local garden — and the antipasti board carries house-cured charcuterie, burrata flown in twice weekly, and a small but careful selection of Italian vegetable plates.

Sommelier Daniel Pernice has won a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence for the list every year since opening — a programme of about two hundred and forty labels organised by Italian region, with deep verticals in Brunello, Barolo, and Etna Rosso, and a small but careful Tuscan dessert-wine section. Service is genuine: career servers who remember a Tuesday-night regular's preferred Pinot, captains who pace courses for a conversation rather than the kitchen, and a wine-pairing recommendation that does not pretend to be Italy in Italy. For a Roman-style date in Greater Atlanta, this is the address.