Long before he became a restaurateur, Peter Reuter had the Italian word “scorpacciata” permanently inked on his forearm. The technical translation is “big feed,” calling to mind a long table full of all your Italian relatives passing around homemade platters. Reuter connects to the word’s more symbolic meaning, which relates specifically to seasonal feasts. Scorpacciata refers to Italy’s so-called “zero-kilometer rule,” the idea that you don’t have to travel even a full kilometer to get all that you need.
“When it’s tomato season, you eat tomatoes all the time; in the fall, you eat from the harvest,” says Reuter, a Cleveland Heights native. “It’s about taking advantage of abundance — eating with the seasons and gorging yourself with the seasons.”
That’s now the objective at Reuter’s restaurant, Scorpacciata Pasta Co., which started as a food stall at The Van Aken District Market Hall in 2018. In August, he finally opened the doors to Scorpacciata’s full-service brick-and-mortar on Larchmere Boulevard. A sleek, 92-seat dining room embraces minimalist decor, such as subway tiles and a live-edge wood bar, that gives focus to the food.
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“When I found the word ‘scorpacciata’ in a travel guide years ago, I was like, Oh my God, that’s going to be the name of my restaurant,” Reuter recalls. “Now, our mission statement is ‘abundantly, locally and in-season.’”
It’s understandable if the idea of a seasonal Italian feast calls to mind rich, heavy foods that beg you to loosen your belt mid-meal. And, certainly, a menu made up mostly of handmade pastas and pizzas doesn’t sound like it should be fresh and delicate. Yet Reuter’s skilled hand and science-minded approach, paired with the depth of his culinary experience, make for surprisingly light flavors and appropriately sized portions that won’t weigh you down.
Take the potato gnocchi ($21), for example, a dish that’s too often dense and gummy. Scorpacciata’s version is the stuff of Italian grandmothers’ wildest dreams: tiny, pillowy and light as air, hand rolled and pan seared for a bit of caramelization. It’s drizzled (not drowned) in a Gorgonzola cream sauce and topped with house-cured pancetta, aged balsamic, shoestring-sliced pears and the tiniest taste of truffle oil. But don’t be fooled by the seemingly small portion: As you savor those last few bites, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find yourself satisfied but not stuffed — all the more room for tiramisu. What’s not surprising is that this dish has become such a fan favorite that Reuter gets complaints whenever he tries to rotate it off his menus.
“I took it off the menu a couple of times at Van Aken, and I received many an email about how pissed people were,” he says. “Now, I try to run variations on it. I’ll add a vegetable, or I’ll remove the Gorgonzola cream in the summer.”
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Reuter, a creatively minded Johnson & Wales culinary school graduate who was mentored by chefs Douglas Katz and Brian Linihan, works hard to strike a balance between what customers want to eat and what he wants them to want to eat. He’d like to push the envelope a little bit further than his recent menus, he says, but he’s giving diners time and space to ease into his ideas.
“It’s hard for someone to order a pasta they’ve never heard of,” Reuter says, “so we started off relatively safe with dishes we know are crowd-pleasers. Now we’re trying to branch out, and in the summer, we’ll start adding in some things that people haven’t seen before.”
For now, that means slowly incorporating unexpected and even uncommon ingredients into some of his crowd-pleasing dishes — like cold pears with warm gnocchi or a pizza featuring roasted kale ($19) with plum tomatoes, shallots and hot honey. Even the most classic of toppings get a new slant, as with the pickled pepper and sausage pizza ($21). Rather than the standard Italian sausage and green peppers you’d get from a chain delivery spot, Scorpacciata’s gourmet spin features a slightly spicy house-made sausage that’s heavy on the fennel, with a vinegary pickled pepper blend made with whatever types are on hand: bell, banana, Serrano, jalapeno.
“When you order this one to go, you can smell the peppers from the pizza box before you even open it,” Reuter says. “It just has so much depth of flavor.”
Because Scorpacciata’s menu is so driven by seasonal availability, its offerings rotate regularly to highlight whatever is most abundant at any given time. Reuter likes to chat with his partners at Rainbow Farms in Madison and other local sources to see what’s coming down the pike, allowing the ingredients to inspire new dishes rather than the other way around.
That’s how he’s ended up with past specials like Campanelli pasta with parsnip cream and Killbuck Valley mushrooms or a pizza with marinated artichoke hearts, onion soubise sauce and lemon caper vinaigrette. Of course, it also helps that by this point, he has years’ worth of dishes to pull from, digging into his Van Aken repertoire and making old ideas new again. But he’s always learning, too, whether he’s reading up on regional Italian cuisine or experimenting with new shapes of pasta.
“We want to be fine dining but in a relaxed setting,” Reuter says. “We’re not necessarily blue collar, not necessarily white collar. I just want everybody to be able to come and grab something simple or grab something
complicated and always feel like they have options.”
Just six months in, the new Scorpacciata is building off its overwhelming success at Van Aken, garnering positive reviews and a warm welcome from longtime fans and new diners alike. Reuter looks forward to the opportunity to reveal all those many aces he’s hidden up his sleeves.
“I want to be the neighborhood restaurant that everybody is like, ‘This place is always changing for the better.’”
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