Richard Rodriguez
I’ve never been to Italy, but for years, I’ve been in an intimate relationship with its younger sibling, New York’s Little Italy, an area I visit every time I go to New York, which is usually once or twice a year.
Though the area is very touristy these days, there still exists a certain kind of Italian restaurant there that I’ve grown to love, and that many others have, too. These are small, intimate, unflashy places that put a pure, uncut focus on the food. Chances are, the chefs are more like cooks, working every day with little fanfare, and the decor and vibe are low-key and modest.
They’re the kinds of restaurants that remind me of Bocca Osteria Romana, newly opened on South Main. There’s no star chef, no big bucks decor, no see-and-be-seen vibe. It’s a small, neighborhood Italian restaurant, run by two brothers and their cousin, that offers a refreshing change of pace from many of the city’s new flash-focused restaurants; it’s also one of the best restaurants to open this year.
I first heard about Bocca while antique shopping in Dallas at a place called Lots of Furniture. The young woman who was working the counter asked me where we’re from. When I told her Fort Worth, she said her boyfriend’s family was in the process of opening an Italian restaurant there. Like I used to do easily when I was a lot younger and thinner and not so married, I got her number.
Richard Rodriguez
A few days later, her boyfriend was telling me about his family’s plans to take over the old Rancho Loma Vineyards space and turn it into an Italian restaurant that specialized in Rome-inspired cuisine. They wanted to emulate the restaurants they know and love in Italy, where they spent time and have family. This would be the second location, Eduardo Mariel explained, revealing they opened the original in Puerto Rico a few years before.
Three months later, the restaurant opened, and on a Wednesday night, my wife and I found ourselves marveling over their pomodoro basilico e burrata, a beautifully presented plate of spaghetti in tomato sauce, topped with a dollop of burrata cheese and fresh basil, and their freshly made gnocchi, whose flavors rotate per the kitchen’s whim. During our visit, the tiny pillowy pastas came drenched in an addicting sauce made of blue cheese and bits of pear.
As much as I loved the pastas, I’m still thinking about their focaccia bread, served straight out of the oven, and their La Stracciatella, a pretty salad of peaches, heirloom tomatoes, and stracciatella cheese, a form of shredded mozzarella; we used the leftovers to dress the focaccia — a wise decision, if I do say so.
The room and vibe are very much a welcome anomaly in Fort Worth’s growing modern Italian scene, in which many of the city’s new Italian restaurants are ventures from already-established chefs or are a part of multimillion-dollar hotels, such as il Modo downtown and Farena in Arlington. No slight to those restaurants, but Bocca is a different experience, one designed to echo what it’s like to dine at a mom-and-pop eatery in Italy.
“That’s exactly what we’re going for,” co-owner and executive chef Alessandro Salvatore would tell me a few days after our meal there. “My brother and I have spent time all over the world, and the restaurants we love, the ones where we’ve eaten at time and time again, or we know people who work there, or we have family who work there, are the small places like this one that put the food first.”
The restaurant is the first stateside concept from this trio of Texas-born family members — brothers Alessandro and Alfonso Salvatore and their cousin Eduardo Mariel. The brothers own a trio of restaurants in San Juan, Puerto Rico: two locations of a Mexican restaurant called Acapulco Taaqueria Mexicana and the original location of Bocca Osteria Romana.
The three are natives of McAllen, Texas, and have lived in Mexico, Italy, and Puerto Rico, regions whose food made indelible impressions on them. Alessandro told me they toyed with the idea of opening a Mexican restaurant in their home state but decided to go with Italian, since Mex-Mex and Tex-Mex are both well covered here.
Richard Rodriguez
“We’ve thought about opening a restaurant in Texas for a long time,” he says. “This is where we’re from. But opening three restaurants in Puerto Rico took so much of our time, it took a while for us to wrap our heads around opening something here. But when we landed on the concept of doing Rome-inspired cuisine, we knew we wanted it to be different from anything else around here.”
Bocca’s current menu is an abbreviated version of its Puerto Rican counterpart but will grow over time, Alessandro says. Right now, they’re starting small, offering a half-dozen housemade pastas, such as cacio e pepe, lasagna al forno, pappardelle, and a rotating risotto; the few pastas that are not housemade are imported directly from Italy, Alessandro says.
Other menu items include scottadito, or lamb chops, and saltimbocca, consisting of a chicken breast wrapped in sage and prosciutto, then marinated in wine. Alessandro says osso buco is coming, too.
Located down an alley that runs adjacent to The 4 Eleven building on South Main, Bocca has sort of an in-the-know, speakeasy vibe. “We’re letting this build word-of-mouth,” he says. “We want to be known as sort of this hidden gem type of place. That’ll allow us to get our feet wet and then hopefully word will begin to spread.”
Bocca Osteria Romana, 411 S. Main St., Ste. 104, instagram.com/boccafortworth
