Welcome to Red Sauce America, our coast-to-coast celebration of old-school Italian-American restaurants.

There was no Little Italy near the small suburb of Dallas where I grew up. Instead, there was Buca di Beppo.

Among my classmates, Buca di Beppo was the go-to destination for birthday parties. The atmosphere was always raucous, the platters of food were so massive that they demanded sharing, and ogling at the sundry black-and-white photos of Italian wrestlers and spaghetti-eating contests that crowded the walls was as much a part of the experience as the actual dining.

It was here that I first listened to the croonings of Dean Martin, his music playing on an endless loop in the dining room. And where I learned what the pope looks like, thanks to the “Pope Room,” where a large bust of His Holiness sits at the center of the table. And where I had my first taste of chicken Parmigiana, served on a giant platter and laced with a golden-brown layer of mozzarella and the most glorious tomato sauce: thick, fruity, with a whisper of garlic. At that time I had never visited any of the restaurants in Italian-American enclaves like Federal Hill in Providence or the North End in Boston. This was the best red sauce I had ever had.

But unlike the checked-tablecloth joints opened by immigrants of Sicily or Naples, Buca di Beppo was not founded by an Italian. It had no roots in Italy and no connection to the Italian-American immigrant experience. Yes, a place showcasing enough pope paraphernalia to border on evangelistic was founded by a Lutheran from central Illinois who told me that the best Italian restaurant in his hometown growing up was a Pizza Hut.

Buca di Beppo was born out of founder Phil Roberts’ desire to not just re-create those bygone red sauce joints, but to present the most exaggerated version of them. Photo by Cole Wilson

In 1993, Phil Roberts was an outgoing Minneapolis restaurateur with a successful steakhouse and a sleek, bistro-style Northern Italian restaurant. But he was obsessed with the red sauce joints he frequented when he’d visit his sons in college in the Northeast. “The way they displayed wealth was in the food they served,” he explained. “They kept the Christmas lights on all year-round. They hung up velvet paintings of Mount Vesuvius.” But he noticed that as the owners were aging, and Italian-Americans became more assimilated into mainstream American culture, these red sauce spots were closing—and there were certainly none like them in Minneapolis.

Roberts saw an opportunity not just to re-create those bygone red sauce joints, but to present the most exaggerated, over-the-top version of them, to create an environment where people could feel totally comfortable—as he describes it, “a sleeves-up restaurant where you don’t have to tie your sweater around your neck and blow air kisses throughout the dining room. I wanted a restaurant people could look down on.”