Lasagnette at Sotto Sotto one of Atlanta’s great dishes

White sauce, as it’s called in English (béchamel in French and besciamella in Italian), tastes like its principal ingredients — flour, milk, butter — and no more, until it gets a barely-there grating of nutmeg.

Stir it in, and this sauce gets its soul.

Sotto Sotto uses nutmeg with a sure-handed temperance. This Inman Park Italian mainstay has a menu heavily influenced by owner Riccardo Ullio’s home province of Emilia Romagna.

Taste carefully, and you might notice nutmeg in the besciamella sauce that envelops the free-form lasagnette alla bolognese, surely the most satisfying version of this dish in town. Also, look for nutmeg in the ravioli nudi (spinach and ricotta dumplings), and even in the restaurant’s bolognese sauce.

“Almost everything in Emilia Romagna has nutmeg in it,” Ullio said. And none of it tastes like a Christmas cookie.