While Wiggins, who headed the kitchen at Panzano for more than fifteen years before leaving last summer to open her first restaurant, doesn't yet have a functioning kitchen at Cattivella, she's eager to share her food with Denver. A Neapolitan wood-burning oven was recently delivered to the restaurant but has yet to be installed; in the meantime, the chef has been practicing on a smaller Tuscan model in her own back yard.

Focaccia di Recco is a regional specialty of Liguria, Italy, and is much different than standard focaccia.
Mark Antonation
Other uncommon dishes will include Italian pasticcio, a dish first created for Catherine de Medici in the sixteenth century. It's a kind of pot pie with a savory top crust that hides the Italian princess's favorite foods: pork meatballs, cheese tortellini and Bolognese sauce. Creamy bechamel and Parmigiano add to the richness of the royal dish. Wiggins notes that in the court of the Medici family, pasticcio was much bigger than her version and came with a domed pastry lid that hid live birds, which would fly out when the crust was broken. (At Cattivella, Wiggins will be skipping the live birds.)

Focaccia di Recco straight out of the oven. The focaccia is stuffed with prosciutto and crescenza cheese and finished with a drizzle of olive oil and a nest of arugula.
Mark Antonation
Here's a look at some of the regional, traditional dishes that will be part of Cativella's opening menu.

Pasticcio filled with pork meatballs, cheese tortellini, Bolognese sauce, bechamel and Parmigiano.
Mark Antonation

Fagioli al fiasco are cannellini beans cooked overnight in a glass flask in the embers of a wood-burning stove.
Mark Antonation

Chef Elise Wiggins serves fagioli al fiasco straight from the glass cooking vessel. This dish was traditionally cooked in chianti bottles.
Mark Antonation

King crab grilled over hot coals — an example of Cattivella's seasonally rotating shellfish offerings.
Mark Antonation

An assortment of bruschetta, with ingredients like blood sausage, wood-roasted grapes and rare Sicilian pistachios.
Mark Antonation