Pasta rolled
by hand,
every morning.

From my grandmother's board
to this one.

My grandmother Assunta kept a wooden board propped behind the kitchen door in Bari Vecchia, worn smooth in the middle from forty years of thumbs pressing dough into little ears. She taught my mother, who taught me, in a kitchen that smelled permanently of durum wheat and lemon rind.

Il Ricciolo opened in 1994 as a four-table room behind a fish market. We still shape every piece of orecchiette by hand, still buy from the same kind of boats that used to pull up to my uncle's dock, and still close the whole dining room for family dinner every Sunday at 4pm — staff included.