Allora

Before the pizza, the wood-fired oven at Allora has already touched half the table — the Kalamata and queen olives blistered with rosemary and chili, the sourdough under the bruschetta, the bare round of dough sent out with sea salt and rosemary to tear into while the menu gets sorted. Allora is a downtown Huntsville Italian kitchen built around two things it does in plain view: fire and fresh pasta. The oven is the through-line, and almost everything that reaches the table has passed somewhere near it.

The pasta side leads with Pappardelle al Ragu, the order to make when a table wants one unmistakable plate: fresh ribbons under slow-braised short rib, roasted tomato sugo, parmigiano, and whipped tallow butter. The list runs deeper than that one dish — spaghetti crema e pepe with crispy braised pork belly and fire-roasted peppercorn, ricotta gnocchi in a truffled wild-mushroom cream, linguine with black tiger shrimp and a sun-dried tomato pesto, canestrini tossed with roasted chicken, schmaltz butter, and crisped chicken skin. Per il tavolo, there are boards to share before any of it: a rotating salumi-and-formaggi plate with smoked ricotta, burrata over sun-dried tomato pesto and toasted almonds. The pizza section earns equal billing. Funghi is the one to split first, a white pie of porcini and wild mushrooms, whipped ricotta, confit garlic, pecorino, and lemon; from there the oven sends out the nduja-and-honey Calabrese, a Carbonara finished with a fresh egg yolk and toasted black pepper, a Mortadella Pistacchio under pistachio pesto, and The Queen, kept deliberately plain with bufala DOP and basil.