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 connection to early 20th century Italian American food.
By the time the city’s Italian restaurant scene was rebuilding in the 1970s and ’80s, the cuisine had been rendered cartoony by pop culture, saturated by commercial mass production, and co-opted by multinational restaurant chains. Italian restaurants founded in Seattle from the 1970s into the 1990s reflected a more refined approach geared towards trendy night-out dining; Marsala wine sauces, Bolognese, and pesto were de rigueur. By the 21st century, the emerging Pacific Northwest cuisine proved a good match for contemporary Northern Italian cooking. Chefs used pasta as a canvas for local, seasonal ingredients and contemporary regional Northern Italian fare gained more cachet. Today, to encounter an Italian restaurant in Seattle is almost certainly to encounter a contemporary Northern Italian restaurant (unless it’s a Neapolitan pizzeria); you are much more likely to find pasta with a quick-cooked brown butter sage sauce than with a deep crimson Southern Italian/Italian American ragù della domenica.
Some of these spots specialize in pasta, others are pizzerias, and still others are less definable celebrations of local ingredients and Italian techniques — sometimes in the form of lavish tasting menus featuring dishes like risotto with Dungeness crab, or kampachi crudo with black lime. If that sounds too refined, we also have some incredible sandwiches on this list, plus one homespun Southern Italian American restaurant that just might ease an East Coaster’s homesickness.
New to the map as of February 2025: Cafe Lago, which has benefitted from hiring new chef Lauren Thompson.
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