Someday, every old downtown in every suburbanized former little village will look like Kenner’s Rivertown. Let’s hope.

Few will be as delicious as this. Among the museums and the theater and the park in this pocket of preservation are two superior restaurants. Both are worth the drive just a few blocks from the airport.

Near Le Parvenu is a charming old cottage housing Ristorante da Piero. The structure and the business are relocated. The house came from elsewhere in Kenner and was the home of the Centannis, one of the first families of this old railroad town. In a nice coincidence, Centanni means “a hundred years” in Italian. That’s about how old the house is.

Piero Cenni’s restaurant originally opened farther up the same railroad line, in the old part of Ponchatoula. A year or so before Hurricane Katrina, he moved it closer to his home in Kenner. Cenni is a native of the Romagna region of Italy whose capital city, Bologna, is known for a distinctive style of Italian cooking. The most famous dish from there is pasta with a tomato-based, long-cooked meat sauce. But saying that is like saying gumbo is New Orleans’ most famous dish. Much else is to be discovered.

Although the cooking, service and prices are unarguably in the gourmet category, the ristorante is a family operation. Cenni is always in the dining room now that his son, Paolo, has taken over the kitchen. His other son, Giacomo, captains. Piero’s wife, Evelyn, is just inside the front door behind the bar where she greets people, makes cocktails and runs checks.

The menu is obviously Italian, but you may find it unfamiliar. Ristorante da Piero hews to cucina Romagna, which diverges from the more familiar New Orleans Italian, Sicilian and Tuscan cooking. They’re bigger on grilling here than in most Italian restaurants. I also find the food here is a bit more rib-sticking.

Another point of departure: Cenni has signed onto many of the trends in the broader world of cooking, particularly in his ingredients. Not only is he using unusual meats and vegetables, but most of them are organic. Some carry the names of the farmers. The beef is grass-fed. The fish is wild-caught. The pasta is made in house with free-range chicken eggs.

Among the specials, and in the frequent wine dinners held here, Chef Paolo goes further a field, sometimes leaving his father’s beloved country entirely to create dishes as hip as any you’ll find locally.

The best place to begin is with either the crostini or the bruschetta — just like Italians to have different names for two dishes whose differences are very subtle. Both are slices of toasted Italian bread. The crostini come with an assortment of five spreads, varying according to season; we had some olives, garlic, tomatoes and what looked like an aioli. The bruschetta are like garlic bread topped with chopped fresh tomatoes and basil. Both are nice in this weather.

So are the mussels. Nice big fresh black ones from Canada, about a dozen to the bowl, with a fine light sauce of the bivalves’ juices, tomato and herbs. You can eat a million mussels without filling up — a good thing.

I would strongly recommend adopting the Italian practice of having a small pasta course early in the meal. They gladly make the demi-portion, even though on the menu pasta is priced as an entree. Every one is spectacular. The tagliatelle (extra-wide fettuccine) with a red sauce and speck (smoked prosciutto) is almost too good to be real. Tortelloni (small, curled-up ravioli) come stuffed with a tangy ricotta salata and spinach, and held together with either a brown butter or the classic bolognese meat sauce.

Even something as prosaic as lasagna takes on a different aspect. It’s meatier than most, with a big flavor, and yet has a light texture. Also here are soft, nice gnocchi with a Gorgonzola cream sauce.

It’s tempting to make pasta an entrée but don’t. There’s too much good food among the secondi, the strange Italian expression for “main dish.” Seafood takes a numerical back seat to meat here but not in terms of goodness. The fish of one day was, for example, halibut. That’s an out-of-towner, a mammoth flounder from the Pacific, but very good, treated simply and deliciously by the kitchen.

Also excellent is the big bowl of cioppino with mussels, clams, half a soft-shell crab, scallops and fish. It’s not as red-peppery as I usually have it, but that’s easily remedied.

Think twice about the mixed grill. It’s a Bolognese classic, and Piero serves it exactly as they do there. But it’s more than you will be able to handle alone or even with just one fellow eater. Round steak, pork, sausage and chicken — a huge pile of simply grilled meats, scented with rosemary.

More polite but still rustic is the duck. You get a half, but split and cooked two different ways: grilled on the breast, confit on the leg. The plate is filled out with a mushroom tart and goat cheese ravioli and a robust sauce. In the same neck of the menu is a roasted rabbit with a rabbit demi-glace flavored with sage and Madiera.

More elegant (but not very Italian) is the filet mignon with green peppercorns in a cream sauce.

While all this eating goes on, one is treated to the operatic singing of a very good tenor. He’s not there all the time (he also sings at Café Giovanni) but often enough.

And you get an interesting wine list. Every time I’ve been here I’ve had a wine I never tried before. The desserts are homemade but straightforward: tiramisu, creme caramel.

The service staff has no pretensions or ceremony and gets the job done well, and Cenni makes the rounds many times each night to make sure his guests are dining like they would in Bologna.•