One of the only things I miss about East Coast cities is the Italian
neighborhoods. I spent a lot of time wandering around Boston’s North
End and New York’s Little Italy, and both neighborhoods were magical
facets of the urban experience. On random days, there would be parades
for the feast of some saint or another, featuring hordes of impossibly
old women dressed in black, crossing themselves and kissing their
rosaries with frightening ardor. The best part of those neighborhoods
is the food, and not that red-and-white-checkered-tablecloth,
fancy-pants bullshit. Once you shake off your inner tourist, you find
that the ideal Italian restaurant is a tiny joint with no
interior-design sense that serves messy plates of good food for cheap
prices.
At the turn of the last century, Rainier Valley was known as Garlic
Gulch thanks to the sudden influx of migrant Italian mine workers, but
when the mining dried up, they moved elsewhere. Rainier Valley has been
the home of continually refreshing waves of immigrants ever since. Deep
in the heart of what was Garlic Gulch, Da Pino’s little storefront meat
shop and restaurant has the charm of a tiny Little Italy bistro and the
pluck of an early Billy Joel song. The first thing you see on walking
into Da Pino is a case filled with meats and sausages that are cured
on-site. You can buy meats deli-style, but that would be missing the
point; Da Pino has a second, tiny room with four tables interspersed
among pallets of restaurant supplies and bottled water—and that’s
the place to be.
Da Pino’s menu is pretty small—some salads, a couple soups,
and hot and cold sand-wiches. There’s a menu board with two daily pasta
specials and a cooler filled with Italian beer and Pepsi products. If
you want an elaborate menu with every pasta option available to you all
at once, perhaps an Olive Garden would be more your speed—Da
Pino’s is canny enough to understand that the appeal of Italian food is
in its simplicity, not in its all-inclusiveness.
The ravioli al Gorgonzola ($13.95) is a perfect example of simple
done to perfection: thin ravioli, exactly as firm as it should be,
stuffed with sharp Gorgonzola cheese, and covered in an Alfredo sauce
that subtly supports the Gorgonzola’s bite. It’s exciting to taste a
plate of pasta that’s been planned from start to finish—the pine
nuts garnishing the dish are an ideal companion on the journey of
cheese, rounding out the flavors into a gorgeous ensemble piece.
The real star at Da Pino is the meat, and there’s any variety of
cold sandwiches to try them out. The coppa ($6.95) is
basically a very good ham-and-provolone sandwich with mustard; but the
prosciutto and mozzarella sandwich ($8.95) is phenomenal. The meats are
all at just the right level of saltiness, shaved to a wispy layer, then
stacked: Da Pino’s cured meats achieve a level of craftsmanship that
you don’t often find in this Oscar Mayer world.
The apex of Da Pino’s meat case is the house-made sausages, which
are frequently served up in the daily pasta specials, and are always on
the menu in the con salsiccia sandwich ($7.95). Da Pino’s
sausages are brilliantly balanced affairs: There’s enough fennel to
suggest freshness, but not enough to overpower; there are hints of
oregano and basil throughout. I can’t recall the last sausage I had
that was this good.
In a remarkable twist, Da Pino’s vegetale sandwich ($6.95)
is also wickedly good. That a place so steeped in cured-meat culture
could produce a knockout vegetarian sandwich with just cheese,
zucchini, and eggplant—roasted and oiled to just the point where
each vegetable snaps when you bite into it—should be a point of
pride.
If this were a perfect world, Garlic Gulch would have flourished,
but our frontier town’s geography and demographics didn’t allow it.
Fortunately, Da Pino is a window into an alternate-universe Seattle
where Garlic Gulch thrived, a place where anyone can wander in and get
brilliant, handmade food for around 10 bucks. 