Rhode Island has a talent for hiding big Italian flavors in unassuming neighborhoods, the kind where winter windows fog from simmering pots and the soundtrack shifts easily from soccer talk to debates about Sunday gravy.
In Providence and the towns just beyond it, pasta isn’t treated like a dish so much as a responsibility.
You feel it in sauces that take their time, in kitchens where someone still salts the water like the sea without bothering to explain why, and in plates that arrive carrying more memory than decoration…