Trattoria Gatto Nero | The room I’d bring her to

A staple at Pietrasanta that has the best nonna food in town

There are restaurants you go to for the food. There are restaurants you go to for the view. And then there are restaurants you go to because, when you have something serious to tell the person sitting across from you, a confession, a decision, a piece of news you don’t yet know how to soften, you cannot tell it to them in the kitchen at home and you cannot tell it to them in a place where the waiter will interrupt twice with the specials. You need a room. You need a room that already knows you. You need a room where the cook is a woman in her sixties named Alberta who has been making the same eight or nine things for thirty years, where the front-of-house knows what you drink, where the lighting is low without trying to be, and where you can sit at the same table for three hours and nobody will rush you out because the table is yours for the night and they understood that when they sat you down. In Pietrasanta, this room, for me, is the Gatto Nero.

It is hard to miss. It sits inside th…