Our Story

In 1987, Antonio "Tony" Rossetti did something his family back in Abruzzo thought was a little crazy. He took his grandmother Lucia's handwritten recipe notebook, a suitcase, and every dollar he'd saved from ten years of working in other people's kitchens, and he opened a tiny restaurant on Maple Street in Portland.

The place had twelve tables, no sign out front (the landlord hadn't finished it yet), and a menu of exactly eight dishes. Everything was made from scratch. The pasta was rolled by hand every morning. The bread was baked in-house. The tomato sauce simmered for four hours, the way Nonna Lucia always insisted it should.

Word spread the old-fashioned way. A neighbor told a friend. A food writer stopped in on a rainy Tuesday and wrote a small review in the Oregonian. By the second year, people were waiting for tables on Friday nights. Tony never advertised. He just kept cooking.

In 2003, Tony's daughter Maria joined the kitchen after culinary school in Bologna. She brought new ideas — the branzino, the panna cotta, a proper wine list — but she kept the foundation her father built. The carbonara is still made the Roman way. The minestrone is still Nonna's recipe. The bread still comes out of the oven every morning at six.

Today, Tony's Trattoria seats sixty, but it still feels like twelve. Tony greets guests at the door most evenings. Maria runs the kitchen with the same standards her grandmother set: fresh ingredients, simple preparations, and the kind of care you can taste.

We've never tried to be the fanciest restaurant in Portland. We just want to be the one you come back to. The place where the hostess knows your name, the pasta is always perfect, and you leave feeling like you just had dinner at a friend's house.