×Sala

Sala

When I first moved to Milwaukee and found an apartment near the UWM campus, a coworker insisted I try his favorite local place, a cozy Italian restaurant called Sala da Pranzo, just off Downer Avenue. I loved it: For several years, the authentic Caesar salad and decadent gnocchi in gorgonzola cream sauce were my go-to order. Most of all, I loved that I was being let in on something. It was clearly an old-school family-run place, a longstanding favorite of the people who lived close by and who had been stopping in for years. Decades, even!

I was wrong about that last bit; Sala opened in 2001, only four years before I sat down for my first meal there. It’s a mark of how deeply the concept of “family-run neighborhood joint” is instilled in the DNA of the place that it felt so we

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