OK, I’m prejudiced, but to me the maternal factor trumps all others in rating Italian restaurants. Reviews could show one to four Mammas, going from an advisory “Mangia” to an imperative “Mangia! Mangia! Mangia! Mangia!” This occurred to me when a cousin was visiting Newport and wanted restaurant recommendations. Since we shared a Sicilian grandmother and her groaning holiday tables, Mamma Luisa immediately came to mind.
The restaurant is on the tail end of Thames Street, where the commercial hullabaloo tapers into residential calm. The place was a private residence, in fact, until co-owner Marco Trazzi converted it in 1992 into a place to show off his mother’s recipes. Prominently displayed is a portrait of Mamma Luisa, who ran a restaurant herself in Italy, as did or do her mother and five sisters.
Marco’s father was a sommelier, so there are wine bottles displayed at the entrance area and labels decorating nearby doors. Two dining rooms are downstairs and one is up a stairway, next to a waiting room. A few more tables could have been placed in that latter space, but why have a line of guests snaking out the door when some at least can be made comfortable? The walls are adorned with framed prints, decorative plates, and such odds and ends as a lute. During our visit, a fresh rose was on every cloth-covered table.
The wine list — heavy on the Italians as you’d expect — goes on for four pages, plus one with half bottles. We come across that last convenience too infrequently at restaurants. Going along with the encouragement to mangia is one to beve — a changing list of 10 wines by the glass, available in three-ounce tasting portions as well as the normal six-ounce. (My shiraz blend and Johnnie’s Montepulciano D’Abruzza were both well appreciated, the latter puzzlingly inexpensive at $6.)
With the exception of an exotic salad, the starters are traditional offerings, from melon and prosciutto to seafood zuppa and beef carpaccio. We shared a mixed antipasto ($12) — billed for two — that was enough for the four of us, complemented by a salad ($4.95) of mixed greens, to add some radicchio, frisée, and lettuce to the cold cuts. Simple can mean simply wonderful when the quality is first-rate: intensely flavored Parma prosciutto, as well as chunks of Parmesan; good salami and the usually overlooked, slightly sweet mortadella, which is like bologna with a culinary school education. Romano Reggiano and pickled vegetables provided further taste contrasts, but the pride of the platter were two crostini smeared with truffle pate. Far too often, restaurant items that claim truffle oil in their descriptions provide barely a whiff. Here the earthy pungency was powerful.
There are a dozen pasta dishes for primi piatti, with a sharing charge of only a dollar. Variety abounds: ravioli filled with butternut squash and cheese ravioli tossed with fava beans. The spinach gnocchi are wonderful, virtual clouds, we knew from before. Marco is from Bologna, so the traditional ragu of the region should be definitive and it is, as I recalled from another prior visit. But Marco is also a vegetarian and has compiled a page of meatless dishes from around the menu as a convenience for others of his persuasion. So Johnnie had a pasta dish that drew from both worlds: garganelli al ragu vegetariano ($14.50), ziti-shaped rolls of egg pasta in a complexly flavored tomato sauce that had bits of seitan instead of ground meat. As a carnivore, I saluted the accomplishment — and tried to coax as many “samples” onto my plate as I could.
