Formaggio Meets Function - Nostalgia pays off in Hyattsville red-sauce joint.

By Tim Carman
Posted: April 2, 2008

It’s hard to say which is cheesier at the Italian Inn—the mile-high lasagna stuffed with what seems like eight layers of noodles and ricotta or the main dining room itself. The latter is a motley assortment of red vinyl booths and worn captain’s chairs neatly aligned with their tables. A mural of some Venetian waterway is plastered onto one wall; on the opposite, exposed white brick is framed by a pair of Romanesque statues. Clusters of glass grapes hang from the chandelier in the middle of the room. You half expect to hear Joe Pesci in the adjoining bar, screaming, “What do you mean I’m funny?”

Yep, the Italian Inn is my kind of place. It’s what I used to consider a real Italian restaurant when I was a boy in Omaha, Neb. Hell, before Roberto Donna, Peter Pastan, and Joseph Muran de Assereto introduced D.C. to authentic cooking from the peninsula, this is the kind of place that you probably considered a real Italian restaurant, too. The dishes listed under “Italian Specialties” here include such U.S.-incubated staples as fettuccine Alfredo, shrimp scampi, and the classic spaghetti and meatballs.

The Italian Inn opened its doors in Hyattsville in 1961, seven years before de Assereto opened Cantina d’Italia, of which Robert Shoffner wrote in the March 2006 Washingtonian: “By 1974, the preponderance of dishes on Cantina’s menu were from northern regional cuisines, so Cantina d’Italia could claim to be our first authentic northern Italian restaurant.”

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