I met Andy Lane for the first time when he walked through the doors of my cooperative commercial kitchen and wanted to talk about pasta. People do this every once in a while, and I always enjoy it. However, this meeting was full of crazy coincidences. We were both from restaurant families; his great-grandfather fled Sicily in the late ‘40s and ended up establishing the longstanding downtown favorite called The Grand Café and Deli.

My grandfather had a diner called Kent’s Café, and a fried chicken restaurant called The Drumstick. We both have a love of Italian food, and we had both studied linguistics. He grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a mere 75 miles from the Wyoming town I grew up in. It was pretty uncanny.