About the theme

Italian Dinner runs the menu top to bottom. Pasta, pizza, lasagna, tiramisu — the headliners — share the grid with the deeper cuts: ossobuco, puttanesca, gorgonzola, limoncello. Italian's vowel-rich phonology makes the filler soft and easy on the eye, heavy on A, O, E, and the L-N-R-S consonant cluster typical of romance languages. The longer compound names (mozzarella, prosciutto, minestrone) anchor the bigger grids; the short ones (pasta, basil, pesto) hide in the middle. Solves at the unhurried tempo of a Sunday lunch.