Valentine’s Day:
It can be an unwieldy, second-string holiday for both the coupled and uncoupled. We can all concede that much. Its most conspicuous failure is that it isn’t Christmas or Halloween, the perennial favorites. Rather, it’s a greeting card holiday devoted to oft contrived romantic gestures, a holiday that remains a working day no less, and conspicuously excludes the happily and unhappily single alike. It’s the redhearted stepchild of the holidays.
But we can evolve past Valentine Day’s archaic ode to courtly love, and instead of celebrating romance exclusively, we can gather around the table to celebrate love in all it’s myriad forms: friendship, family, community, and, yes, romantic love can still come too.
There’s nothing worth celebrating more than love itself, than selflessness, loyalty and deep, abiding affection, and there is no better way to do it than a meal shared which, unlike the proverbial box of chocolates and red roses, is a timeless moment, a means of real connection. As Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
No culture seems to have internalized this quite like the Italians who are at the same time (if we’re to believe the stereotypes at least) a notoriously hot-blooded and amorous people, fiercely loyal to family, and adept at the art of both eating and cooking. Food and love and family are all virtually synonymous, and the art of the meal is in the very marrow of Italian culture. So whether you’d like to have bottomless glasses of Valpolicella with your mates, a family-style dinner at home, rounds of antipasti with a longtime partner, or are planning an evening of shared-spaghetti-strand romance with your new paramour, we’ve found an Italian meal for you and yours this Valentine’s Day. If you’re the dining out sort, we’ve picked three lovely local Italian restaurants: Alleia, Boccaccia and Tony’s Pasta, all of which are in handsome, historic locations and each serve their own take, from rustic to refined, on Italian food.
Alleia
Fare available at AlleiaLocated in the old Harrington building on the now revived Main Street, Alleia is the sister restaurant of St. John’s & St. John’s Meeting Place. As Chef Daniel Lindley’s foray into rustic Italian food, the menu incorporates fresh, regional ingredients into dishes alongside high-quality, imported Italian ones, yielding food that reflects both Italy and Tennessee. The heart of the restaurant is a custom wood-burning, hand-cut brick oven that blazes at 750° and yields perfect pizza, the real stuff with a bubbly, crisp and slightly charred crust. The menu boasts seven types of house-made pasta and there is an ever-evolving daily menu that offers a carousel of specials like large pillows of gnocchi with ] fall-apart tender braised lamb shank, tangy zante currants, pine nuts, and the fresh bite of mint which is also, incidentally, perhaps one of the best things you will ever put in your mouth.