Sunday is the long one

Every restaurant has a night that shows what it is really like, and ours is not Saturday. Saturday is loud and full and excellent, but it belongs to the room. Sunday belongs to us.

We open at three

Which means Sunday has no clear line between lunch and dinner, and no reason to pick a side. People come in at half past three in whatever they wore all day, order a spritz and some artichokes, and then discover an hour later that they are ordering pasta and staying.

Happy hour runs all day

Not four to six. All of it, from the door opening until we close at nine. Ten-dollar cocktails and the house wine two for one, for the whole service, on the day of the week most people can actually take advantage of it.

That is deliberate. A Sunday table that starts with a cheap Negroni and a plate of meatballs at the bar tends to turn into the best kind of long dinner, and we would rather have that than a full room at seven that empties at nine.

What to do with it

Come early and start at the bar. Eat something off the happy hour list before you have even looked at the menu. Then take a table when you are ready, order a pasta to share and one big plate between two, and finish with an amaro.

You will be home at a reasonable hour and you will have had a proper evening out, which on a Sunday is a genuinely good trick.

We are closed Monday. That, too, is deliberate: somebody has to have a day off, and after a Sunday like that we have earned it.