With a number of new restaurants dotting the Southwest Washington landscape lately, Little Italy’s Trattoria may be one of the older local eateries in the area. The recipes served to patrons predate the historic brick building of its downtown location, adding to the rich history of this Vancouver classic.
A husband-and-wife team from Los Angeles founded Little Italy’s Trattoria in 1995, and after two years of solid business they opened a second site in Cascade Park. In 2006, the original owners decided to relocate once again to New York. They handed the restaurant’s reigns to one of their managers, Theresa Feigner, and her business partner, Jeff Boyer. The two have since worked to maintain the establishment’s old-country authenticity.
Despite the changes Little Italy’s experienced in earlier years, Feigner said the 17-year-old Vancouver staple is still just a “mom-and-pop” restaurant serving traditional Italian cuisine.
“The recipes are all authentic, handed down from the original owner’s family,” Feigner explained. “I worked with her mom for the first two years that I worked for the company. It was a struggle at first because she didn’t speak a whole lot of English and she would just throw things into the bowl. We needed measurements, so I would take it out of the bowl and measure it.”
With marinara sauce simmering for hours every morning and dough made fresh daily, Feigner’s commitment to convention is strong. This can prove difficult in a business where premade food is the new norm.
“When we hire cooks, a lot of them come from places where they can’t even make a simple sauce because it all comes prepackaged and they just heat it up,” she said. “We make every sauce from scratch.”
The large competitors where some of Feigner’s 17 employees used to work may see more traffic every day, but Little Italy’s boasts a loyal customer base that feels like family to the owners. Feigner recalled numerous stories of diners who eat there five days a week and order the same dish every time, or of watching customers’ children grow up and eventually bring their own kids into the trattoria.
“Being around for that long, you get to see a whole new generation,” Feigner said. “It’s really cool to know that this must be a happy memory for them as a kid. Our customers are very loyal to us and I think a lot of that has to do with us not changing a whole lot.”
Feigner believes these familial qualities also make Vancouver the perfect location for her business.
“You have a sense of community here,” she said. “It’s big but you don’t realize it. You can even put Camas, Battle Ground and Washougal in and it’s still got that little-town feeling.”
As the local restaurant scene continues to expand, the owners hope Little Italy’s remains a constant for residents. Feigner said although many customers ask, they have no plans to open a third location. Their focus, instead, is developing the business they already have, with expanded social media outreach one of their biggest opportunities for future growth.
However, her message on higher-tech channels will be the same, simple statement she’s been telling customers for years: “Come in and try a lasagna. There’s no way you’re not going to like it.”
