PA House, which opened in April, is rooted in Italian cuisine, but it’s not your typical undertaking of an Italian-influenced restaurant. There are no red-and-white checkered tablecloths, no piles of pasta showered with grated cheese. Instead, the place is named after the fact that the owners, Franco (born in Rome, raised in the U.S.) and Rachel (she’s a local!) DiCarlo have owned a house in the Lehigh Valley for more than 20 years and would come out here on the weekends from New York with their children.

So, rather than a moniker that immediately tells you the place is Italian, PA House is more personal than that. It’s yet another iteration of the DiCarlos’ Pennsylvania home, one that just so happens to offer an outstanding cocktail menu, prosecco on tap and an imported pizza oven that can crank out 12-inch Neapolitan-style pizzas in just minutes. (The dough gets a multi-day ferment, naturally.) Franco describes it as “Italian at its heart” and the experience as not fine dining, but also not casual—a hybrid. “We’re low-key but premium,” he says. (Now that feels Italian.) It’s hard to argue with a house full of such amenities. As Rachel puts it, “We eat here how we like to eat.”

-Excerpt from Lehigh Valley Style | Read Full Article