A chance of meat sauce

The object, when one is seized with a sudden hunger for bolognese (or its less exalted red-gravy cousin, the meatball), is not to spin your wheels fretting over who has the most authentic version - the traditional recipe was actually registered in Bologna in 1982 - but to track down the closest place open.

Until a handful of years ago, this meant a place called Giuliani's in Narberth. It was a barn of a dining room, an Italian family place that after maybe half a century closed up shop, leaving town folk - leaving me - without an old-shoe go-to joint for weekday meat sauce and meatballs and spaghetti (a dollar or two extra got you the square-cut, house-made stuff).

Sadder? We could walk to the place with our neighbors, down the tree-lined streets of town, pretending on the way home that we were burning off the calories we'd so blithely consumed.

Some places, of course, never left: Say, Villa di Roma, on Ninth Street, where Basil DeLuca still makes tennis-ball-sized meatballs by hand, one by one. And Ralph's, the trouper up the street, which has its strengths, and its weaknesses.

From 1903 until the mid-1980s, there was Chip's, Eighth and Passyunk, a haunt for former Eagles coach Dick Vermeil, and according to local lore, various boxers and promoters, and of course there were Sinatra sightings (and rumors that certain take-out cartons were destined for his table).

It closed up, too. But a few years ago, a familiar menu surfaced in Haddonfield. Vincent "Chip" Cipollone, 83, Chip's former owner, was back in the kitchen at Tre Famiglia Ristorante, rolling the gnocchi by hand (last week he was doing pumpkin gnocchi), and talking up his grandson, Mark Berenato, who has taken over as the top chef.

So you're lucky if you're seized by the bolognese urge in Haddonfield. Tre Famiglia has a couple of gallons of the fresh, tangy stuff simmering (for about four hours) each day, the pork, veal, and beef braised with onions and garlic, a little pecorino in there, ready to top the wide pappardelle - which is closer than skinny spaghetti to the wide tagliatelle that's commonly part of the dish in Bologna, in Italy's north.

It sounds redundant, but at Tre Famiglia, Berenato says, it's not uncommon for customers to add the restaurant's tender meatballs to orders of meat sauce, pushing the weekly output at the 90-seat place to 200 meatballs.