Seattle has an interesting relationship with Italian food. Other regions of the U.S. (especially the East Coast) have a long lineage of classic and homey Italian American restaurants founded by early 20th-century immigrants from Southern Italy, but the Italian restaurant heritage in the Puget Sound region is much more recent — as in, there are no remaining Italian restaurants in Seattle that were founded before the 1970s.

That’s largely because the city’s early Italian district was almost entirely razed and displaced by highway construction between the 1940s and 1970s. The ensuing gap meant that Seattle no longer had much first-hand personal connection to early 20th-century Italian American food.