Radda Trattoria

It's twelve years later. I'm in Boulder, sitting at Radda Trattoria across from Laura, my wife. Our table is a mess — evidence of terrible gluttony and a complete inability to stop ordering at anything even remotely resembling a reasonable amount of food. We're surrounded by half-eaten pizzas and plates of Tuscan salami, bowls of olives, scraps of prosciutto-wrapped pork loin with braised peppers and artichokes, and bruschetta with white-bean purée. I am eating mascarpone polenta, drooling with butter and speckled with tiny bits of chive, off the tip of my finger while still smelling the delicate, sweaty, earthy stink of black Italian truffles from a plate somewhere on Laura's side of the table. I pull my finger out of my mouth, look her right in the eye and, from the bottom of my heart, say, "Jesus, I wish I worked here..."

Radda — which Matt Jansen, owner of Mateo, opened a year ago in north Boulder's low-rise sprawl — is a perfect example of the kind of restaurant that Colorado now does better than New York, San Francisco, L.A. or Chicago; the kind of restaurant I'm beginning to believe can only be opened in a place like Colorado, someplace where the expectations are a little lower, the potential for standout greatness a little higher, the clientele starving and just waiting to be amazed.

It's a great restaurant, but it's also a comfortable restaurant, an unassuming restaurant, a restaurant where families come to eat penne al cinghiale and chicken soup in a parmesan broth, made with winter vegetables, lemon and faro, and where rogue CU economics professors sit and argue vehemently about the Bush tax cuts over plates of golden-brown pressed chicken and small bowls of rosemary-roasted fingerling potatoes. In Manhattan, Radda would be wickedly successful — the sort of roots Italian joint that inspires the swells to fight each other in the streets for a place on the waiting list. In Chicago, it would be feted like the Second Coming — over-boosted by those foodies still pissed that they can't get Batali to open a place in their area code. In Vegas, it would be turned into some faux-Tuscan set piece complete with wandering shepherds and the smell of grape arbors pumped in by compressors. But in Boulder? It's just a little spot in a retro strip mall, with plenty of parking and always room for another table, another party, another restaurant critic waiting to sing its praises.

The board is made up mostly of small plates, little tastes, brilliant snacks and expert whetters of appetite, each given such loving attention that they seem to glow. The kitchen crew — led by Jansen and exec Don Gragg — executes it brilliantly, with a beautiful simplicity and a passionate understanding of ingredient over artifice. The food can be unbelievably good. The polenta is amazing. I want to bathe in it or, failing that, eat a bathtub full. So soft, so perfectly cooked (even to the point where, as it cools slightly, it begins to pull away from the sloped sides of its bowl) and swimming in a tarn of butter. On an earlier visit, I had gnocchi alla Bolognese smoothed with heavy cream to cut a sharp edge of spice and a polpette di vitello that actually stunned me at first taste — making me sit bolt upright, then leeching all the iron out of my spine until I was in danger of collapsing in a swoon like some kind of 1920s movie starlet gone goofy on laudanum. It was so Italian it was almost French, if you know what I mean — the hand-ground veal meatballs sitting on a bed of brothy braised kale and lentils and wild boar cheek, like collard greens in pot likker cooked in a Parisian soul-food restaurant by an expatriate Italian grandmother homesick for the gentle hills of Chianti.

There's a salumi menu offering bresaola from Lombardi, speck from Alto Adige, prosciutto from Emilia-Romagna and salami from Salumeria Biellese in New York — a complete culinary tour of Italian cured-meat history on one plate — and pizzas, five of them, that I would put up against any pizza in the area, made with Gragg's housemade mozzarella, housemade fennel sausage, Italian Grana Padano and (on my favorite) razor-thin prosciutto and a quivering, gently cooked, over-easy egg speckled with ground black pepper. For breakfast, there are croissants and plates of pancetta. For lunch, caprese salad made with bloody red grape tomatoes and twenty-year-old balsamic vinegar, fried rock shrimp with fennel or grilled rapini with garlic.