<table border="0" align="left" width="310"><tr><td><img src="http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/gallo_lasagna.jpg" border="1" align="left"></td></tr><tr><td>Le Gallo Rosso's lasagne is as big as a brick, with hearty layers of pasta, ground pork and veal, well-fashioned tomato sauce and cheese. Photos by Robin Garr.</td></tr></table>LEO's Eat 'n' Blog with Louisville HotBytes
(Le Gallo Rosso, Melillo's)
If you've been around the Louisville dining scene long enough to remember back when the old landmark Casa Grisanti was still a pizzeria, you know that long before there was trendy "Northern Italian" we had spaghetti with meatballs and plenty of spicy red tomato sauce. Extra credit for red-checked tablecloths, plastic grapevines and wicker-wrapped Chianti bottles recycled as candle holders.
To get technical about it, "Northern Italian" isn't really authentic Italian so much as a somewhat idealized American rendition of popular dishes from all over Italy. The genre gained traction during the 1970s as a lighter, more upscale reaction to the hearty tomato-sauce Italian that had gone before.
In fact, the red-sauce genre is arguably more honest, drawing its inspiration from the heritage of Southern Italy - Calabria and Sicily - filtered through New York, New Jersey and the Northeast by immigrants in the Ellis Island era.
Because food snobs tend to diss the joys of lasagna and eggplant parmigian and, well, spaghetti and meatballs with tomato "gravy," it's fairly easy to find a purportedly "Tuscan" repast in Louisville, but great immigrant Italian-American restaurants have become thin on the ground.
Of course, most of the high-end "Northern Italian" spots, knowing which side their pasta is sauced on, still include spaghetti and meatballs and other old family favorites somewhere on the menu.
But a couple of newer spots are earning particularly glowing reputations among those of us who still have a deep affection for Italian immigrant family fare in a family-style setting.
<b>Melillo's</b>, for instance, has earned almost fanatical loyalty among its regular customers since moving into the quaint Piazza Felice on East Market in 2004. And a newcomer, <b>Le Gallo Rosso</b>, a tiny eatery that opened last year in the "Shoppes on the Alley" on Bardstown Road, is also building a small but growing "cult" following.
Full reports in LEO and on LouisvilleHotBytes.