Lavagna Barracks Row is bestowed with hearty Italian

Approaching the blackboard is unfailingly daunting, whether it's pointing out the adjectives in 5th grade, solving a multi-tiered equation in 11th, or doing any number of other things between those ages that don't hide your boner. Finally making them comfortable for you (blackboards, not ragingly public boners): Lavagna.

Lavagna proudly displays their rustically simple Italiano on tiny, wood-framed individual chalkboard menus doled out to diners in a quaint duplex with a skylit bar above a ground-floor dining room, the name itself owing to a small Northern Italian city famous for producing slate, but not Slade, as the Real Housewives heartthrob was clearly produced in Handsometown, USA. The menu's of course made for rotating, but opening offerings include blissfully simple mains like pan-seared scallops and roasted chicken in olive oil, as well as know-'em-and-love-'em pastas like rigatoni w/ chicken & broccoli, gnocchi w/ mushroom sage, and tomato-creamed Radiatori, ensuring Italian restaurants in The Godfather aren't the only ones full of heat. The drink menu gets its own blackboard as well, and's scribbled with an egg white/ pineapple-infused rum/ pisco "Clasico Amore", a rye/vermouth/basil bitters 'tail dubbed "The Politics of Mr. Jenkins", and a group drank with white wine, St Germain, and a “Sprite/Ginger combo”, or what people used to call Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

The bar's also serving eight beers (Peroni, Menabrea), as well as small bites like fried gnocchi, no-frills meatballs, and a pasta tart, ensuring that just like in middle school, the mere mention of a tart is enough to give you a boner.