Bella Verona

The Restaurant

Trattoria Bella Verona opened in 1996 at 107 Essex Street, one block from the Peabody Essex Museum, and has been owned and operated by chef Giorgio Manzana — a native of Lake Garda — for every one of those years. The dining room is small (about fifty seats), warm, and unapologetically nostalgic: exposed brick walls, white linen on the tables, a hand-painted mural of Verona behind the bar, candles in Chianti bottles, framed photographs of the Manzana family scattered across the walls. Service is largely family and long-tenured: Giorgio's wife Lina works the room nightly and the senior servers have been there for a decade or more.

The menu reads as a confident northern Italian trattoria rather than a Salem-tourist Italian-American room. Pastas are made daily by hand: tagliatelle al ragù bolognese cooked the long way (six hours of stove time), pappardelle with wild mushrooms and truffle oil, lobster ravioli in saffron cream, gnocchi al gorgonzola with toasted walnuts, a baked rigatoni alla siciliana with eggplant and ricotta salata. The mains are equally rooted: veal saltimbocca, osso buco alla milanese over saffron risotto on the weekend menu, branzino al sale baked in a salt crust for two, a chicken Marsala that has been on the menu since opening and that the regulars insist remains the best version north of the North End.

The wine list is a sentimental tour of Italy — Veneto Valpolicella, Friulian whites, Piedmontese Barolo and Barbaresco for the larger tables, a small but real Tuscany section, and an aggressively reasonably priced by-the-glass programme. The room runs loud in the best way: birthdays are sung in Italian (Giorgio insists), tables push together to accommodate growing parties, and the senior captains will appear at the table with a complimentary limoncello at the close of the meal more often than not. For thirty years of consistency on Essex Street, Bella Verona is the Salem birthday room.