Pasta. It does an awful lot of things well.

It’s a great vehicle for pasta sauce, for starters. It sticks to the wall nicely.

Also, it’s there when you need to carbo-load for a particularly competitive round of bocce.

Like tonight. Or anytime thereafter that you decide to roll into Vendetta, H Street’s new haven of—you guessed it—pasta and bocce.

This place is built on the bones of the old Red Palace, and it’s from the crew behind the H Street Country Club, so you know what to expect—unfussy food and a solid recreational option.

If it’s an after-work Negroni or prosecco on tap that you’re after, ease into the first-floor bar, which looks like Italians took over a Montana lodge—wood paneling everywhere, plus taxidermy and vintage Italian posters.

The upstairs room, with its Vespas suspended from the ceiling and reclaimed stained glass, is the spot to retreat to with a big group to share platefuls of pasta. The onus is on you to match eight sauces (walnut-kale pesto, meatball and turnip ragù) with seven types of pasta.

Either way, you know how this is going to end: with you signing up for “next” on one of the two gravel-and-oystershell courts, smack-dab in the middle of each floor.

So yeah, bring your bocce shoes.