If you're going to call yourself an Italian restaurant, you have to know the language, though for the guests themselves the menu items can sometimes be, well, difficult to pronounce. You know you're in an authentic place when the staff verbally breezes through the menu with ease and doesn't dumb it down. Traditional Italian restaurants have a bit more respect for traditional recipe names. Such recipe names might be hard to pronounce, but they're not hard to love.

What follows is such a dozen regional favorites, which obviously is only a partial list. Like a previous list of popular local pizza places, these are not national chains and have been around for awhile. But they all have "Italian" in their names (or their names themselves are Italian). Sure, you can go there for the pizza, which is often great, but there's more plenty more deliciousness as well.