Sunday Sauce is a monthly Milwaukee Record series about the area’s Italian food and the places, people, and traditions that make a meal feel like home. I’m chasing how these restaurants, grocery stores, events, and small details keep feeding people into comfort, community, and a sense of belonging in a loud world. This chapter of Sunday Sauce is supported by The Florentine Opera and its upcoming production of La Traviata.

My wife Shelby and I are cat people. We have two cats: Gnocchi, and our princess furball Olive. And when you’re a cat person, you tend to get excited about your friend’s cats, too.

Cats are funny little creatures in that they don’t require quite the same level of supervision as dogs, but you also can’t just leave town for a week and put out a tray of lasagna for them to survive off of. So, sometimes you need friends to come over and check on your cats when you’re out of town. And, in return, you go check on theirs.

Such is the relationship Shelby and I have with our friends Kyle and Kaylee Pieczynski-Bast.

Recently, Kyle and Kaylee traveled to Italy, and Shelby and I were happy to check in on their three adorable cats: Frank, Stella (my dear sweet Stella), and Penny. My little cat nieces and nephew. So while Kyle and Kaylee were gallivanting around actual Italy, we happily fed the cats, cleaned out the litter boxes, and spent some time giving the little fur babies the attention they deserved.

The nice thing about helping out friends is that friends are usually pretty grateful and they even hit you back with a treat of your own. In this case, that treat was taking Shelby and I out for dinner at Sorella in Bay View.

A Summer Night On Sorella’s Patio

Sorella (2535 S. Kinnickinnic Ave.) sits right in the heart of Bay View, and I’ve been there several times over the years. The name Sorella means “sister” in Italian and pays homage to owners Chef Kyle Toner and Paul Damora’s New Jersey Italian heritage, as well as Toner’s two daughters. The restaurant describes itself as the meeting point between old school and new school, East Coast and Midwest.

I’d eaten inside Sorella plenty of times, but I’d never managed to sit on the patio. On this particular beautiful summer evening, sitting outside with my wife and two close friends was an absolute must. And there’s no party quite like one that starts with a cocktail.

My first involved mezcal, Montenegro, ginger, and lime. Montenegro is one of my favorite amari. It has this slightly sweet, herbal quality that always reminds me a little bit of biscotti, and paired with the smokiness of the mezcal and the bite of ginger and lime, it made for a very tasty and refreshing way to begin the night.

We started with the Antipasti menu and ordered the Mussels Oreganata and the Wood-Roasted Broccoli. The mussels were excellent. Prepared with butter, garlic, lemon, oregano, parsley, and breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs added a nice little crunch while the butter and herbs tend to do when left alone together: make mussels taste extremely good. It was also Shelby’s first real experience eating mussels, and I’m happy to report she emerged a believer.

The broccoli was roasted alongside with apricot, chile, and almonds. There is something about putting broccoli next to an open wood fire that makes all of broccoli’s best qualities come popping out. You get those crispy edges and roasted bitterness, then the sweetness from the apricot, some heat from the chile and the crunch of the almonds. Both were delightful but if we had to pick, I think the broccoli might have been everyone’s favorite appetizer.

For our entrées, Kyle ordered the Seafood Bucatini, loaded with shrimp, scallops, calamari, cod, and a garlic white wine sauce. Afterward, Kyle sent me his official assessment:

“Got it because I love seafood and bucatini, which had plenty of both. Great garlic flavor. Super delicious.”

Kyle also praised his cocktail, the Shrubbery, he got two of them.

Kaylee, meanwhile, pulled off a move that I respect deeply and asked if she could do a 50-50 split between two pastas: the Rigatoni alla Vodka and the Cavatelli with “Monday Sauce.” The latter comes with a broken meatball, sausage and pork ragù and ricotta.

Kaylee later told me that the rigatoni vodka was “creamy and delicious, perfect, exactly what I was looking for.” She said the Monday Sauce was also satisfying and, importantly, made great leftovers.

And come on, vodka sauce is so good. Vodka sauce is one of those sauces that makes my eyes roll back into my skull and causes me to lose consciousness for about 30 seconds.

Shelby ordered the salmon special that evening. A pretty slab of roasted salmon with the crispy skin over greens, with an arugula salad alongside it. She enjoyed it thoroughly.

Then there was my pork chop.

A Distillation Of Summer’s Sun

I ordered the Duroc Pork Chop, a 14-ounce bone-in pork ribeye served with hot and sweet cherry peppers and roasted garlic. The pork chop itself was very good. But the real star of that plate was everything surrounding it.

Those oily, stewed hot and sweet peppers mixed with garlic, onions and the juices from the collective were absolutely fantastic. As if the summer sun itself was distilled into an oily edible masterpiece. I kept dragging the pieces of pork through them, trying to get as much of that sweet, tangy, garlicky mixture into every bite as possible.

It immediately reminded me of the peppers and onions my grandfather would make with Italian sausages when I was growing up, and of something I love making at home: peperonata.

There are many ways to make peperonata, but at its simplest, it’s summer vegetables cooked down until everything gets soft, sweet, savory, and a little jammy. It’s the kind of thing that seems almost suspiciously simple considering how good it tastes. Put it over pork. Put it over fish. Spoon it into polenta. Throw it into an omelet. Or, in a pinch, pile it onto a piece of toast and call it dinner. That sweet and tangy combination does something similar to my beloved vodka sauce. For a few seconds, time and space become irrelevant.

Sorella’s menu leaves plenty of reasons to return. There are salads and antipasti, pastas, and wood-fired pizzas, and secondi like Chicken Parmigiana, Chicken Savoy, and veal, followed by a dessert menu with cannoli, chocolate budino, Nutella calzone, and tiramisu.

I came dangerously close to ordering the veal. Next time.

Friends Around The Table

The thing I loved most about this meal wasn’t one particular plate. It was getting to eat it with my wife and two really close friends. A lot of Sunday Sauce involves me running around Milwaukee on my own, so sitting outside at a restaurant named for family, sharing food and drinks with people we love, felt especially fitting. It was a nice reminder that, with the right people around the table, friends can start to feel a whole lot like family.

So if there’s one lesson from this edition of Sunday Sauce, it’s pretty simple: be good to your friends. The next time someone asks you to cat-sit, do it. You’re helping a friend, you get to hang out with adorable cats, and if you’re lucky, there might even be a pork chop and some wood-roasted broccoli waiting for you at the end of it.

That’s comfort, that’s community, and that’s kind of what Sunday Sauce is all about.

P.S. A Brief Appreciation Of Italian Cats

Here’s a little bonus bit to explore before you click away: Italy’s cats.

When Shelby and I visited Italy in 2019, we bounced around Rome, Florence, Cinque Terre, and Bologna. Shelby has this weird Disney-princess ability to attract stray cats wherever we travel, which naturally means I ended up taking pictures of all of them. So, in honor of the cats that inspired this edition of Sunday Sauce, here’s a brief history of cats in Italy, along with a few photos of my favorite feline photos from our travels.

Cats have been kicking around Italy for a very long time. Domestic cats descend largely from African wildcats, but recent research suggests their arrival in Europe was later than previously thought. The earliest known European cat comes from Sardinia, Italy around 2,200 years ago, followed by rapid expansion across the mediterranean over the next two millennia, likely aided by trade and seafaring. Italy still embraces its free roaming felines today.

The most famous example is Largo di Torre Argentina in Rome, an archaeological site containing Roman temples, including the complex where Julius Caesar was assassinated. After the ruins were excavated in 1929, stray cats moved into the below-street-level site and never really left. Today, the colony is cared by volunteers known as “gattare,” essentially Italian for “cat ladies.”

Anyway, here are some Italian cats.

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