NOW OPEN NOVEL ITALIAN

Paul Verica brings a simpler version of the city’s hottest food trend to NoDa

- TAYLOR BOWLER

A WAVE OF NEW ITALIAN restaurants has crashed over Charlotte in the past two years: osterias, gourmet pizza places, Venetian wine bars. They’ve opened in affluent areas where upscale restaurants tend to congregate, like uptown, SouthPark, Dilworth, and Myers Park.

But Paul Verica, a two-time James Beard semifinalist, ventured outside the nouveau-Italian trend’s bubble in February when he opened Orto in the Novel NoDa project.

ORTO ITALIAN KITCHEN

416 E. 36th St. ortonoda.com

Hours: 5 p.m.-9 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday 5 p.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday 5 p.m.-9 p.m. Sunday

The menu is a departure from the farm-to table style he’s known for at The Stanley, but his Italian dishes are just as lovingly prepared. He doesn’t go overboard with unnecessary garnishes or elaborate presentations, because he knows pizza and pasta don’t need to be fancy or reinvented to please the dining public.

The 3,000-square-foot space is a few steps from the LYNX Blue Line’s 36th Street Station, in the same building as Wooden Robot and Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams. Orto, which means “garden” in Italian, isn’t a dimly lit trattoria with checkered tablecloths and dark stucco walls. The interior is open and bright with high ceilings, light wood tones, and framed watercolor images Verica brought back from Italy. One wall features a 13-foot mural of a vegetable garden by artist Duy Huynh, who owns Lark & Key gallery in Dilworth.