La Spaghett Pasta House

Dinner at La Spaghett begins with a choice most Italian dining rooms never put to the table: not which plate, but which sauce. The Upper James Street kitchen organizes its menu around more than thirty made-from-scratch sauces, grouped into families — tomato, cream, cheese, pesto, olive oil, butter — and a diner pairs one with a pasta shape instead of ordering a fixed composed plate. The format is the identity, and it rewards the regular: one dinner is rarely enough to get through the families, so a table comes back and works down the board.

The sauce families are where the kitchen shows its hand. Pollo Tuscany is the clearest read on the comfort-food register — chicken, mushrooms, and sundried tomatoes carried by a white wine cream sauce, rich without a complicated build. Cream Vongole anchors the seafood lane, folding mussels, shrimp, and scallops into cream or lemon cream with leeks, zucchini, and spinach so it never reads as a plain seafood Alfredo. Lemon Vodka brightens the cream side with peppers, spinach, sundried tomatoes, and pistachios; Quattro Fromaggio pushes the other way, four cheeses over broccoli, mushrooms, and bacon. Around them sit the deeper cuts a second or third visit turns up — Sambuca Shrimp flambéed and served on linguine, the radicchio-and-walnut Roman Reds, and Nonna's, billed as a grandmother's traditional meat sauce. Before the pasta, the openers lean the same way: a garlic-infused chicken broth floated with tortellini, grilled crostini stacked with prosciutto and artichoke, an antipasto built well past the usual. The pastas underneath them run from linguine and penne rigate to tri-coloured fusilli, cheese tortellini, and gnocchi, with rice pasta standing in when an entrée needs to go gluten free.