Forty years ago, an Italian-born chef named Alfredo Viazzi turned his back on the vast vat of tomato sauce that the city's Italian restaurants had long depended on, and the fad for so-called Tuscan cooking was born. At Trattoria da Alfredo, a small place just off Abingdon Square, he charmed the likes of James Beard, who excitedly dug into beef carpaccio, chicken-liver crostini, acorn squash tortelloni, green beans with pesto, and steaming plates of pasta that were gloriously un-red, flying in the face of a century of... More >>>