A chance of meat sauce

The object, when one is seized with a sudden hunger for bolognese (or its less exalted red-gravy cousin, the meatball), is not to spin your wheels fretting over who has the most authentic version - the traditional recipe was actually registered in Bologna in 1982 - but to track down the closest place open.

Until a handful of years ago, this meant a place called Giuliani's in Narberth. It was a barn of a dining room, an Italian family place that after maybe half a century closed up shop, leaving town folk - leaving me - without an old-shoe go-to joint for weekday meat sauce and meatballs and spaghetti (a dollar or two extra got you the square-cut, house-made stuff).

Sadder? We could walk to the place with our neighbors, down the tree-lined streets of town, pretending on the way home that we were burning off the calories we'd so blithely consumed.

Some places, of course, never left: Say, Villa di Roma, on Ninth Street, where Basil DeLuca still makes tennis-ball-sized meatballs by hand, one by one. And Ralph's, the trouper up the street, which has its strengths, and its weaknesses.

From 1903 until the mid-1980s, there was Chip's, Eighth and Passyunk, a haunt for former Eagles coach Dick Vermeil, and according to local lore, various boxers and promoters, and of course there were Sinatra sightings (and rumors that certain take-out cartons were destined for his table).

It closed up, too. But a few years ago, a familiar menu surfaced in Haddonfield. Vincent "Chip" Cipollone, 83, Chip's former owner, was back in the kitchen at Tre Famiglia Ristorante, rolling the gnocchi by hand (last week he was doing pumpkin gnocchi), and talking up his grandson, Mark Berenato, who has taken over as the top chef.

So you're lucky if you're seized by the bolognese urge in Haddonfield. Tre Famiglia has a couple of gallons of the fresh, tangy stuff simmering (for about four hours) each day, the pork, veal, and beef braised with onions and garlic, a little pecorino in there, ready to top the wide pappardelle - which is closer than skinny spaghetti to the wide tagliatelle that's commonly part of the dish in Bologna, in Italy's north.

It sounds redundant, but at Tre Famiglia, Berenato says, it's not uncommon for customers to add the restaurant's tender meatballs to orders of meat sauce, pushing the weekly output at the 90-seat place to 200 meatballs.

Meatballs weren't talked about in polite foodie company a few years back. But along with fried chicken and mac and cheese, along with the retro, comfort, down-home thing going on, they came back with a vengeance - in sliders at Di Bruno Bros., as a Monday-night tradition (still going on; pork and poblano meatballs, anyone?) at London Grill, as baby softies (on tomato-infused mashed potato) at Amis, where they're based on the South Philly recipe of Sal Vetri, the father of Marc, the famous chef. They're big at Barbuzzo now, and at Radice in Blue Bell, and topping the pizza at Pizzeria Stella.

But it was simple cosmic coincidence that during a particularly wretched bout of bolognese deprivation a week ago, I saw that John DiPrimio, the chef/owner at the Narberth Cafe, was having one of his Friday-night special dinners, a prime feature of which was a pasta bolognese dish.

I couldn't make it that night. But the next day he packed up a pint for me and told me how he'd made it in the 1980s at Tra Vigne, the California benchmark for the eat-local-meets-rustic-Italian-cookery movement.

DiPrimio sweats his onions, garlic, and a generous amount of diced carrots in olive oil, then braises his ground beef and hot and sweet sausage in red wine. Then he adds diced and crushed tomatoes, keeping the sauce thicker for cooler weather. Then fresh basil. A spin of extra virgin olive oil to finish it. And grated reggiano Parmesan.

OK, he said, the Narberth Cafe isn't a trattoria in Bologna. It sure isn't Tra Vigne, where he'd stick a prosciutto bone in the bolognese pot for flavor, the hoof sticking out the top. And, no, it wasn't the venerable Giuliani's - may it rest in peace - either.

But at home, warmed up and spooned on my angel hair (I didn't have wide noodles), the bolognese was as rich and lush and balanced as any I've had lately, the carrot conferring a sweetness missing in some more-acidic versions on the menus in South Philly.

And, yes, I added one of DiPrimio's meatballs - because I could, and because nothing dispatches wretchedness like excess.