Italian food guide
How to read an Italian menu
Italian menus are organized by course, and plenty of Italian restaurants in the US follow the same order. Once you know what each section means, ordering gets easier and sharing gets smarter.
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The courses, in order
A traditional Italian meal is built from separate courses, and a full menu is usually laid out the same way.
- Antipasti: starters, from the Italian for "before the meal." Think cured meats, cheeses, vegetables and fried bites like arancini.
- Primi: first courses. This is where pasta, risotto and soup live.
- Secondi: second courses, usually meat or fish.
- Contorni: side dishes, often vegetables or potatoes, ordered separately from the secondo.
- Dolci: desserts such as tiramisu, panna cotta and gelato.
You don't have to order every course
Nobody expects you to work through five courses. A common approach is to share an antipasto or two, then order one pasta or pizza each. If the menu has a separate pizza section, treat it like a primo.
Ordering a pasta as a main is perfectly normal at most restaurants here. Plenty of diners skip the secondo entirely.
Menu words worth knowing
- Al dente: pasta cooked so it's still firm to the bite.
- Alla: "in the style of." Pasta alla vodka is a tomato and cream sauce flavored with vodka, and it's on the menu at Seneca Trattoria as casarecce alla vodka.
- Carbonara: a Roman pasta made with eggs, hard cheese such as Pecorino Romano, cured pork and black pepper. Traditionally there's no cream in it.
- Arrabbiata: "angry" in Italian, a tomato sauce with chili heat.
- Ragù: a slow-cooked meat sauce.
- Arancini: fried rice balls, often with cheese inside.
- Margherita: pizza with tomato, mozzarella and basil.
Italian-American classics
Some of the dishes people think of first, such as chicken parmigiana, were developed in Italian-American kitchens rather than in Italy. Fettuccine Alfredo is generally traced to Rome, where it was pasta with butter and Parmesan; the creamy version common in the US is an American adaptation. None of that makes them worse. It just helps to know what you're ordering.
In our methodology we look at whether a menu reflects real regional cooking or leans on a generic Italian-American greatest-hits list, but we review both kinds of restaurant. At Seneca, for example, the chicken parm is the dish we'd tell you to get. Our full notes are in the Seneca Trattoria review.
Where to put this to use
Browse every restaurant we've reviewed in the San Diego guide, or start with the best Italian restaurants in San Diego.