In Boston, it always does. Italian food is our enduring favorite. We wait in line for a seat at the Daily Catch, Neptune Oyster, and other North End mainstays. La Padrona, chef Jody Adams’s glamorous Back Bay Italian restaurant, was the city’s hottest opening last year. Getting a reservation at the tiny Tonino in Jamaica Plain is like winning the lottery. When New York restaurateurs look to invest here, Italian is often what they serve up, from Contessa, Major Food Group’s Newbury Street aerie, to Ci Siamo, coming from Danny Meyer in the Seaport late this year.

Where other concepts sputter, Italian succeeds. All That Fish + Oyster, a seafood spot from restaurateur Garrett Harker, opened in September 2023 and shuttered a few months later; Harker and team replaced it with Standard Italian. Columbus Hospitality Group, which opened South End bistro Bar Lyon in 2018 and closed it in 2021, debuts Gary’s Pizza at the Washington Street location on Friday. When Dorchester’s Savin Bar & Kitchen was picked to be featured on an upcoming reality show that cannot yet be named, the producers chose to reinvent it as an Italian concept.

Why does Boston love its Italian restaurants so much?

“Italian food is comfort food. I mean, who doesn’t love a dish of spaghetti?” says chef Lydia Shire, who has been serving the cuisine for decades at places including Pignoli, Scampo, and Bar Enza, the Harvard Square restaurant whose kitchen she just took over.

“Italian food has been a crowd-pleaser from Day 1. Give the people what they want,” Shire says. “Italian food reigns, it really does, and for all the right reasons. It’s satisfying and just so tasty.”

In some ways, it is that simple: Italian food is delicious and familiar. Call it the Papa Gino’s effect. As kids, we grow up with spaghetti dinners and pizza at birthday parties. As adults, we travel to Italy and return home hungry for more.

“Italian cuisine has long been one of the three most popular ‘ethnic cuisines’ in the United States, with the other two being Chinese and Mexican,” says Bret Thorn, senior food and beverage editor at Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality. “All three are essentially mainstream at this point, and in the Northeast that’s especially true with Italian cuisine. This part of the country, from Philadelphia to Boston, has many Italian-American communities who retain affinity with the mother country and consider Italian dishes, particularly ‘Sunday gravy’ pasta dishes, to be comfort food.”

For historical perspective, one can look as far back as the post-Civil War era, when immigrants from all over came to the United States and opened food businesses, says John Mariani, author of books including “How Italian Food Conquered the World” and the newsletter Virtual Gourmet. Even then, Italian cuisine had an edge due to familiarity: Americans understood ingredients like tomatoes and peppers. Diners came to see neighborhoods like the North End as enticing places to eat, then economical ones. “Through the 1920s and even the Depression, you could get a lot of spaghetti and meatballs for a very cheap price,” Mariani says. “After World War II, a lot of GIs came back with visions of Italian food they had over there.”

Over the decades, Italian restaurants in this country became swanker and more refined, with high-quality ingredients and wines increasingly available. Then came the era of the celebrity chef. “You had people like Marisa Iocco and her partner [Rita D’Angelo, at Galleria Italiana and others] come in and do seafood no one was doing, Jody Adams and Michela Larson at Rialto, even Todd English at Figs — that was a new type of Italian food, done with a certain type of personality. You were at that time, we’re talking the late ’80s and ‘90s, blessed with a plethora of terrific, terrific chefs,” Mariani says. “Those restaurants, run by those people, were the coolest, hippest restaurants around. You had a very good Italian landscape to work with.”

Today, that landscape has changed in many ways, particularly when it comes to doing business.

“Restaurants are tough. It’s a tough business right now. The costs of business and labor are through the roof,” says Jamie Mammano, chef-owner of Columbus Hospitality Group, which operates Mistral, Mooo…, Ostra, and Sorellina. There has been a dramatic shift this way since COVID; with tariffs and other changes in the air, the current moment feels even more uncertain for independent operators. In terms of new restaurants in Boston, Mammano sees room for very high-end concepts, like steakhouses, or casual spots like Gary’s Pizza. Anything in between is a challenge.

“You pick and choose your battles,” he says. “Pizza seemed like a safe bet. It’s Roman-style, which is something different. It’s fun.”

Balancing the taste-to-risk ratio is always a concern for investors.

“Boston is a meat and potatoes town, and it’s a comfort food town,” says Patrick Lyons, cofounder of the Lyons Group, whose current portfolio includes about 20 restaurants and entertainment venues, Bar Enza and Scampo among them. “There are pockets of adventure, of course there are, but if you’re looking for a viable business, you don’t want to be testing the edges. You want to be trying to give people what they want in the largest numbers, satisfying as many people as you can on a daily basis and being consistent about it.

“When you talk about Italian food, you find yourself in a sweet spot of comfort food in our city.”

But in Boston, when we say Italian food, we are talking about something much more diverse than pasta and pizza. There are seafood-focused spots like Bar Mezzana and Neptune, regional restaurants like Karen Akunowicz’s Bar Volpe and Fox & the Knife, pasta specialists like Giulia and Little Sage, Venetian cicchetti bars like SRV, chef-driven tasting menus like Pammy’s, neighborhood gems like Carlo’s Cucina Italiana, Delfino, and Via Cannuccia … I could go on, and on. When French restaurants veer from onion soup and steak frites, we begin to classify them as New American. When Italian restaurants look past red sauce, they are still considered Italian.

Boston supports all kinds of concepts, from experimental pop-ups to expensive omakase and everything in between. But we’re a smaller city, and scale can affect whether adventurous concepts thrive. There are simply fewer people available to splash out on an envelope-pushing chef’s tasting menu on any given night. (There are always exceptions: See Carl Dooley’s Mooncusser or Rachel Miller’s Nightshade Noodle Bar in Lynn, for example.)

“You need a lot of density,” says attorney Daniel Dain, cofounder of the Restaurant Investment Group and author of “A History of Boston.” “You can do a very precious tasting menu restaurant in New York and London, because you have the density.”

Years ago, he says, an up-and-coming chef approached the Restaurant Investment Group with a plan for an 18-course tasting menu. They were impressed. They also said no. “It would have been the best restaurant in Boston,” Dain says. “It just wouldn’t have made any money.”

Six months later, the chef was back with a new pitch. Again they were impressed. This time they said yes. The chef was Douglass Williams. The restaurant was Mida.

Devra First can be reached at devra.first@globe.com. Follow her on Instagram @devrafirst.