Wende Stevenson, who now owns MoMo Italian Kitchen with her husband, Aaron Gross, entered the restaurant business working for Antonio “MoMo” Gattini in the late ’80s. She was 21. He was, she says, “the most fascinating man I’d ever met.” Fresh from Italy, he presented traditional dining in courses—primi and secondi—and was not interested in making concessions. Pasta sent out with the main course? Never! “I apologize, I’m Italian,” Gattini said in a disclaimer on the menu. Dallas had to be taught. The bulk of the North Dallas restaurant’s recipes came from his mother, Fernanda Gosetti, the Julia Child of Northern Italy. She wrote more than 50 cookbooks and, along with her two sisters, revived the Milan-based culinary magazine La Cucina Italiana. Illustrations from the Gosetti cookbooks dotted MoMo’s menu, which was used until a few years ago. Part history lesson, part primer, it traced the origin of pizza to the ancient Greeks and cited the first documentation of the word “maccheroni.” MoMo’s specialties were the dishes of Northern Italy: risottos and ris in cagnon, the creamy wedding rice dish that Milan is known for, with veal rolls cradling prosciutto. Diners came for Northern-style lasagna, with a rich béchamel replacing the tomato sauce, and for desserts like zabaglione (an egg custard flavored with Marsala) and ice cream dishes—amarenata and sciuscia—from Gosetti’s repertoire that you couldn’t find anywhere else in Dallas. When Gross and Stevenson bought MoMo Italian Kitchen in 2017 from Gattini’s son Carlo—who had gone on to the gelato business with Botolino Gelato Artigianale—they kept the recipes. MoMo had always been their favorite restaurant and date-night spot, even when they’d gone on to other jobs at The Green Room, Mot Hai Ba, Shinsei, and Lola. The old menu remains as a relic, tucked in a drawer. In addition to MoMo Italian Kitchen, here are three Italian spots and dining icons now relegated to Dallas history: