Get Winter Soup Club
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The dining room is small, about 50 seats. You’ll likely need a reservation. But I think the best place to sit is at the adjacent bar, wedged between neighborhood characters, chit-chatting with bartenders, the Bruins game on overhead. Do like the couple to your left are doing: Split a salad, order two pastas, get a glass of wine. This is one of the world’s perfect meals, at any restaurant worth its salt. But Susi is known for his handmade pasta, and pasta is what Little Sage does best.
Order any pasta made with squid ink.
A first visit, and maybe every visit, needs to include ricotta gnocchi, tender and pillowy dumplings made with love or sorcery, I know not which. They are very good, and then they meet lobster, tomatoes, marjoram, smoked butter. It ought to be the lobster that puts this dish over the top, but in fact it is the smoked butter. It is savory, unexpected alchemy, like bacon but not bacon. Chasing its flavor, you keep taking another bite, and another.
Order, too, anything with squid ink. A recent menu featured coal-colored campanelle, the little trumpets tossed with crab, Calabrese peppers, and bread crumbs. The dish was so flavorful and textural, and unapologetically, fiercely spicy. Gosh, it was glorious. And now I can’t eat it again, because Susi tweaks the menu frequently, and it is gone.
And then there was spicy squid, with chitarra pasta and olives.Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
This is part of Little Sage’s formula: The restaurant gives you the dish you didn’t know you were dying to eat, you eat it, you crave it, you come back, it’s gone, you find another dish you didn’t know you were dying to eat … And thus, regulars are born. Each meal is familiar but different, offering new enticements plus that dish you get every time. And the check doesn’t make you fall off the barstool in shock, crushing the guy who said he liked your scarf and the woman who seems to also work here sometimes and that nice salad-sharing couple and anyone else in close proximity (which is everyone).
It’s the circle of life: Cauliflower agnolotti with roasted mushrooms and truffle butter replace the chestnut version that came before.Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
Chestnut agnolotti, lightly sweet and hip-deep in rosemary brown butter, make way for a cauliflower version of the filled pasta, with roasted mushrooms and black truffle butter. Instead of spicy crab, there’s (much less) spicy squid, interlaced with strands of chitarra pasta and plump and briny Castelvetrano olives, topped with delicate flakes of bonito that curl and shimmy in the heat coming up from the dish. They lend the smoky umami of Japanese dashi to every mouthful. In Little Sage’s Italian cooking, there are moments where Asia flickers into the picture: a subtle hit of ginger, mushrooms battered and fried like tempura.
The gnocchi are always on the menu, as well as paccheri with sausage ragu and the Roman classic bucatini alla gricia, here made with pepper, pecorino, and pancetta rather than the traditional guanciale. (Light heresy, perhaps, but still plenty porky.) So are two dishes that demand you deviate from pasta at least some of the time: The most tender tentacle of charred octopus, with potatoes and sweet peppers, rich with olive oil and tangy with vinegar. And the chicken, crisp-skinned from the brick oven, served in a skillet so hot it could brand you, bathed in rich brown butter with crisped sage leaves and roasted potatoes. Octopus and roast chicken are everywhere in this town, but few places prepare these simple dishes so precisely and well.
Little Sage’s roast chicken is anything but boring, crisp-skinned from the brick oven and served with brown butter and roasted potatoes.Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff
That oven also blesses roast monkfish over stewed mussels with tomatoes, fennel, and saffron crema, as well as fazzoletti, delicate, almost crepe-like handkerchiefs of pasta folded with spinach, fontina, tomatoes, and bites of short rib. The dish, another that has followed Susi from restaurant to restaurant, is surprisingly light.
It’s fun to roll the dice: What’s artichoke puttanesca going to be like? Oh, just stinking gorgeous, saucy with cherry tomatoes and tender, mild bites of artichoke, a sauce I scrape the plate for and wonder how I might re-create it at home. It’s served with skewers of perfect grilled shrimp one night, salt cod croquettes another. I hope it stays a while.
Salt cod croquettes, just lucky to be here with artichoke puttanesca.Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
There are sometimes misses, nothing you’d want to send back, but the occasional shrug-and-on-to-the-next: a vaguely boring kale salad, perfectly fine; oxtail with a stiff blob of chickpea polenta (perked up still by an unexpected dried cranberry gremolata); dry olive oil cake with mascarpone and Amarena cherries. Dessert isn’t Little Sage’s strongest offering, but it is nice to have it here, not always the case at North End restaurants.
At the bar, sip a refreshing spritz or the Oliva, made with gin, Amaretto, lemon, honey, and olive oil, topped with a fried sage leaf that somehow knits the combination together. (Of course, you can have an espresso martini.) There’s Lambrusco by the glass, some crisp Italian whites, an easy-drinking Langhe Nebbiolo. The bartenders are excellent company, and the servers in the dining room are friendly and attentive, ready to pour tastes of this and that for indecisive wine drinkers. Sometimes there are featured wines, seemingly at random; if these appear when you happen to be here, enjoy.
Writing about restaurants in Boston, there is one question I get asked more than any other: Where should I eat in the North End? Well, it’s a long list. I’m happy to have such a satisfying answer to add to the top. Go to Little Sage.
Fazzoletti, unexpectedly light, has followed Susi from restaurant to restaurant.Little Sage
LITTLE SAGE ★★★★
352 Hanover St., North End, Boston, 617-742-9600, www.littlesageboston.com
Wheelchair accessible.
Prices Antipasti $17-$22, pasta $27-$34, dishes from the brick oven $20-$33, desserts $12, cocktails $15-$16.
Hours Mon-Thu 4-10 p.m., Fri-Sat noon-11 p.m., Sun noon-9:30 p.m.
Noise level Conducive to conversation.
★★★★★ Extraordinary | ★★★★ Excellent | ★★★ Very good | ★★ Good | ★ Fair | (No stars) Poor
Devra First can be reached at devra.first@globe.com. Follow her on Instagram @devrafirst.
Dining and Cooking