Wende Stevenson, who now owns MoMo Italian Kitchen with her husband, Aaron Gross, entered the restaurant business working for Antonio “MoMo” Gattini in the late ’80s. She was 21. He was, she says, “the most fascinating man I’d ever met.” Fresh from Italy, he presented traditional dining in courses—primi and secondi—and was not interested in making concessions. Pasta sent out with the main course? Never! “I apologize, I’m Italian,” Gattini said in a disclaimer on the menu. Dallas had to be taught.

The bulk of the North Dallas restaurant’s recipes came from his mother, Fernanda Gosetti, the Julia Child of Northern Italy. She wrote more than 50 cookbooks and, along with her two sisters, revived the Milan-based culinary magazine La Cucina Italiana. Illustrations from the Gosetti cookbooks dotted MoMo’s menu, which was used until a few years ago. Part history lesson, part primer, it traced the origin of pizza to the ancient Greeks and cited the first documentation of the word “maccheroni.”