Ranking Italian restaurants is a dangerous assignment because everyone has a favorite they are prepared to defend. I still went for it, and Ohio made the decision much harder than I expected.
A few places won me over almost immediately. Others grew on me slowly, somewhere between the first bite and the moment I realized I was scraping the last bit of sauce from the plate.
These 10 restaurants are the ones that stayed with me. Putting them in order was the difficult part…