Cucina de Santis

Cucina de Santis
1759 First Ave S, 587-4222

Mon-Fri 10:30 am- 4:30 pm, 11 am-3 pm Sat, open Sundays if game.

Gus, my month-old son, is a bit of a bruiser. Already big at birth, he’s managed to put on some crazy weight in-between doctor’s visits. Maybe it’s how I’ve been eating. Since I started breastfeeding, I’ve taken liberties with my diet as I rarely had before, even when I was pregnant. And so lasagna has come barreling back into my life, not just as an occasional splurge, but as a perfectly legitimate meal that can be eaten, quite practically, with one hand (a crucial quality for the new parent).

So my ears pricked up when I heard that Cucina de Santis, a new SoDo restaurant, was dishing up not just lasagna, but homemade sausage, meatballs, and eggplant parmigiano. When I was growing up in the Northeast, nearly every restaurant I ate in served this same genre of Italian, or should I say, Italian-American food. Most of it, however, was poor to terrible: watery red sauce, limp noodles, mediocre sausage, and spumoni so hopped up on food coloring that it glowed fluorescent pink and green. We’re lucky today that Italian food in Seattle has more interpretations: We can sample meals from Emilia-Romagna, Abruzzi, or Sicily; we can go into hock for imported oils, vinegars, and wines worth their weight in gold; and we can gorge ourselves on the heaven-sent charcuterie of Armandino Batali.

On the other hand, when it’s done right, it’s hard to resist that hyphenated Italian-American food: the tomato-rich cooking of southern Italy filtered through a generation or two of American offspring. Michael de Santis, owner and chef of the Cucina, will tell you how his cousins, who live in Cosenza, south of Naples, taught him how to make a proper lasagna, but his five-month-old joint takes as much inspiration from the big family-run restaurants on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx as it does from the old country itself. I almost wish he had installed a fake grotto in the back dining area like you can find in New York.

Instead there are plenty of family pictures on the entrance wall (with some choice snaps from the ’70s); there are picnic tables in the dining room, dressed up with a little chintz; and there is de Santis himself standing at the register, ready to banter with the customers and admire babies. When Carmen and I walked in, de Santis peered down at Gus and said something about his beautiful head of hair. “He’s got a hairy back too,” I said, proud of even his more freakish traits. “Hey, so do I,” chuckled de Santis. And with that furry exchange, we ordered lunch.

The kitchen serves up de Santis’ family recipes, rich on red sauce and melted cheese, fried peppers, and onions whose smell beckons you to eat more than you really should. He grinds his own pork sausage and stuffs it full of fennel seed and red and black peppers ($6.50). It’s then browned up and served, fragrant and juicy, on a raft of toasted focaccia. We also got sandwiches stuffed with fat meatballs in gentle marinara ($6.50) and layers of roasted vegetables ($6.50). Sadly, that last one came to the table broiler-blackened. I picked through the charred remains and salvaged some sweet roasted cherry tomatoes, peppers, and thin slices of eggplant seasoned with mint.

For dessert, the deli case held a suspicious-sounding cream-cheese cheesecake sweetened with Splenda (made for Atkins adherents), but instead I wolfed down a delicious ricotta version, rich on lemon zest and golden raisins soused in rum ($3.50).

De Santis also serves a favorite drink of mine, the slightly insane BibiCaffé, equal to four shots of heavily sweetened and carbonated coffee. I haven’t seen the stuff for years, since I moved west. “It’s great with a little milk,” I explained to Carmen. “Not milk,” he corrected me, “heavy cream.” (Forget Red Bull–toss some vodka into a BibiCaffé and you’ve got yourself a drink.)

Gus broke out in a howl halfway through lunch, so I grabbed my lasagna to go. Back at home, I happily slurped up the mild, light-handed layers of hand-rolled noodles and balsamella and red sauces ($7.50). If indeed it is lasagna that is making Gus grow so quickly, then between the Cucina and lasagna perennials Caffé Lago and La Spiga, I’ll soon have a sumo baby on my hands.