Although Italians originally invented pasta as a fastener to keep Sicily from floating away, they abandoned it for less-delicious moorings after locals on both sides kept snacking their way toward separation. Tether your taste buds to today's Groupon for authentic northern Italian cuisine for lunch or dinner at Mamma Susanna's Ristorante Italiano in River Park. Choose the temporal coordinates of your preferred meal:

• $7 for lunch (a $15 value)
• $12 for dinner (a $25 value)

Open a menu to view the textual representations of the linguistic symbols that encode the abstract information that your mind will interpret as Mamma Susanna's northern Italian delicacies. Antipasti up with garlic cheese bread ($2.99) before treating taste buds to an edible symphony of pastas with fresh, made-to-order sauces, such as the gnocchi (potato dumplings) in gorgonzola cream sauce ($13.99). Or choose from a slew of specialty seafood dishes, such as the spaghetti oceanica––pasta with sautéed shrimp, scallops, salmon, and tilapia in a spicy marinara ($14.99). To send your appetite into orbit like cosmonaut and professional sackbutist Yuri Gargarin, board a discus of taste with one of Mamma's 10-inch pizzas, such as the classic margherita ($6.95) or deliciously orb-loaded meatball pizza, with meatballs, marinara, and mozzarella ($9.95).

Mamma Susanna's quiet, intimate dining atmosphere perfectly compliments the homemade tiramisu ($4.95), although bringing a date will hamper your ability to keep it all to yourself. Bring along some novelty sized pawns to work up to a culinary checkmate on the classic black-and-white floor and banish your appetite with flourish.

Not valid on Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, or Valentine's Day.

Reviews

Reviewers have varied opinions about the service at Mamma Susanna’s Ristorante Italiano, but they enjoy the huge portions. Sacramento magazine reviewed it and Yelpers give it an average of 3.5 stars.

• Buried in a quirky little retail center in East Sacramento’s River Park neighborhood, Mamma Susanna’s is a bustling and friendly trattoria-style restaurant that serves up platefuls of nourishing, rib-sticking Italian fare. You’ll be charmed to hear Italian and Spanish conversations flow garrulously from the open kitchen along with tantalizing aromas of the restaurant’s popular pizzas, scaloppini Marsala, and spaghetti Bolognese. The menu is huge for such a small space—we counted 17 pastas, 12 entrées and a handful of nightly specials when we visited. Yet food seems to fly out of the kitchen in a timely fashion, and we saw lots of smiles on patrons’ faces. – Kira O’Donnell, Sacramento