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In the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge's off-ramp, Via Oreto could be just one more Southern Italian restaurant with its clean heartwood siding and brick walls. The restaurant is owned by a mother-son team from Sicily, and mothers figure prominently into the menu with dishes like Mama's own meatballs. Wonderfully, this is the rare Sicilian trattoria that does nearly everything right. The menu is a careful mixture of old standbys and harder-to-find dishes, like a starter of pepperoni ripieno, a red pepper filled with rice, beef, bread crumbs, and garlic, baked in a tomato sauce so the juices mingle. Homemade pastas may include bucatini chi sarde, a traditional Sicilian dish of fat spaghetti in a pungent dry sauce of fresh sardines ground up with fennel, pine nuts, and baby raisins. The house specialty, pollo scarpariello, features pieces of chicken baked in a dry rub of olive oil, lemon, garlic, and oregano, giving it a crispy, salty skin that reveals moist meat inside. Sicilian desserts are known for their richness, and here they’re no exception. The strawberry zabaglione, a pudding-like dessert with egg yolk, sugar, and Marsala wine whipped together and poured over fresh strawberry hunks, has a creamy consistency and dense, slightly alcoholic flavoring, which makes it an intoxicating reminder of the bold Sicilian meal you just consumed.  — Timothy Cooper

Pollo scarpariello, $21.95; strawberry zabaglione, $8.95