Our Story

A chef, a family, a small Roman idea — and the room they built around it.

IHow it began

A Sunday dinner that turned into a restaurant.

For years, the Dedier family ran a different room. The Mimosa House — Saturdays and Sundays, a brunch line out the door, twelve hours on your feet, a thousand plates by the time the sun went down. The one night the family wasn't feeding anyone else, they fed themselves. And the food on the table, every week, was Italian.

Pasta. Sunday gravy. Plates passed across a long table. Stories from the morning's service. Older stories from older services. A house full of garlic and laughter and a family who, after fourteen hours on the line, finally had nowhere to be.

It was at one of those Sunday tables that Lou said the sentence out loud. We should open an Italian restaurant.

IIThe trip

A little while later, Devin went to Italy.

He came home with a problem. Most of what California celebrates as "authentic Italian" isn't actually from Italy. It's from a different place entirely — the Italian-American kitchens of the East Coast that took shape a hundred years ago on a different continent, under different conditions, with different ingredients than the ones the cooks had grown up with.

The food those kitchens created is delicious. It's also not what you'll be served if you sit down at an osteria in Trastevere on a Tuesday night.

IIIThe gap

The thing Americans were calling Italian, you couldn't find in Italy. The thing that was actually Italian, you couldn't find at home.

That's the gap Devin and Lou decided to close. If they were going to open this restaurant, it was going to be the real one — the one that didn't exist yet in El Dorado Hills, or Folsom, or anywhere in the greater Sacramento foothills. The one that served their friends and neighbors the food you'd otherwise have to fly nine hours and rent a car to find.

A true Roman holiday — at a table you could drive to.

A Vacanza Romana.

VOn the record

A short timeline.

2023

Doors open

A Friday night in spring. The room the Sunday-table conversation built.

2024

Best Italian · Most Romantic

El Dorado Hills calls early. Best Wine List, the same year.

2025

Best Overall · Best Chef

Devin named Best Chef — El Dorado Hills & Folsom; Sacramento 40 Under 40.

2025

Tower Bridge

Lead Chef of the Tower Bridge Dinner — a long table on a bridge over the river.

Reserve a table Read the menu