Amici Restaurant

Amici's kitchen answers to two regions of Italy rather than the whole country — Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany — and lets that choice decide the menu. The clearest sign of it is a dish most Italian menus around Cambridge never attempt: Rosette di Parma all'Emiliana, pasta rolled with cooked ham and Fontina, cut into rings, baked in cream under meat sauce and Parmigiano Reggiano. The Romanini brothers built the place this way on purpose — scratch cooking, unhurried, regional by design. The framing is not decoration; it is the organizing idea behind everything that follows.

The pizza comes off dough made fresh daily from Caputo 00 flour, fired in a wood-burning oven that runs north of 750 degrees — thin, Tuscan-style, blistered at the edge. The Pizza Amici carries Alfredo, mozzarella, wood-oven-roasted chicken, home-cured bacon, chorizo, roasted red peppers, and arugula; the Pizza di Parma keeps it spare, prosciutto and parsley over olive oil and garlic. Pasta is hand-cut and the sauces are built to order. Nancy's Fettuccini folds Portobello into a Parmesan cream sauce finished with a touch of nutmeg, and the kitchen smokes its own bacon for the plates that call for it. The antipasti reward a slow start — Calamari Fritti, mussels in white wine and chili, and a Bocconcini Stuffed Meatball wrapped in pizza dough and fried to order, a twenty-minute wait built into the dish.