Seattle has an interesting relationship with Italian food. Restaurants specializing in “Pacific Northwest cuisine” often have Italian flourishes on their menu — throw some local seasonal ingredients in some kind of pasta dish and you got yourself an entree, baby. And there are pizzerias galore all over Seattle serving a variety of styles.

But true Italian restaurants are thinner on the ground here than they are in other regions of the U.S. More to the point, tourists don’t really come here for the Italian food. But the Seattle metro area is home to a lot of great Italian restaurants.