Comments (0) Best Sunday Sauce - 2006
Ruggero's
Used to be there were three, not two, certainties in life. There was death. There were taxes. And there was Sunday sauce. If you were Italian and it was Sunday, your mother would most definitely be up to her elbows in breadcrumbs, raw egg, and pounded meat, putting together the veal or pork meatballs, rolling up the braciole, separating the spareribs, divvying up the hot sausage, and slow-cooking the whole caboodle in her secret tomato gravy recipe. If you were not Italian, you had wisely cultivated many friends who were, and you had secured invitations for dinner -- preferably into infinity. Sadly, the Sunday-sauce-cooking mama is as rare now as the speckled booby. Restaurants have been forced to assume the necessary burden of our desires. Some do it well, some passably, but none with the panache or generosity of Ruggero's, where the resident myth goes that no customer has yet been able to finish a plate of "Mama's Everyday Gravy." That gravy is indeed served daily at Ruggero's. Spongy meatballs, chunks of pork, sweet sausage in a tart sauce laden with onions and tomato chunks, al dente rigatoni, and a sprinkling of fresh Parmesan -- it's enough to make every day a holy day.
