Vince's Italian Restaurant and Pizzeria
It’s all here—the red-checked tablecloths, the plastic grapevines, the posters of the Amalfi coast—in a room whose light appears poured through red sauce and where the perfume of a thousand Italian grandmothers is still no match for the garlic. Yep, it’s Vince’s—the four-outpost empire Enzo and Ada Mottola built from the humble pizza stop they opened in the Rainier Valley 50 years ago this fall. Back then the Valley was known as Garlic Gulch, for the numbers of immigrants from Italian ports of call like Napoli, where the Mottolas sailed from. With them came their recipes for red-sauce everything, garlic prawns with fettuccine, and chicken Marsala. If that chicken is a mite overcooked, you can bet the Marsala sauce it’s lavished with will be rich and sweet and satiny and memorably delicious when sopped with the soft white bread that arrives on a plate with wrapped butters. All the Vince’s (Federal Way, Burien, Rainier Beach, and Renton) are thronged with families, but Renton’s is special. It shares its parking lot with a Dollar Store.