Most evenings at SE Ankeny’s Normandie, diners pack into the wooden tables and line the marble bar for plates of gochujang-glazed ahi and Parisienne gnocchi with Dungeness crab, finishing with calvados and madeleine cookies. But on a Sunday evening in December 2024, things were a little different. Rather than the familiar coastal French cuisine supported by a globe-trotting pantry, heaping plates of meatballs, eggplant parmesan, and “disco fries” filled the tables. Diners sopped up marinara from pasta bowls with cheesy garlic bread and knocked back Negronis and lemon drops, as the event’s eponymous “Sunday sauce” filled the restaurant with the aroma of braised meats in rich tomato sauce. For dessert: banana tiramisu and birthday cannoli cakes.

Amanda Cannon, Normandie’s co-owner and wine director, says the event was inspired by her mother’s passing earlier that year. She was pregnant at the time and processed the loss by cooking the meals she grew up eating at her grandmother’s home in Hoboken, New Jersey: meatballs, pastas, salads, wings, and the iconic Italian American dish referred to as Sunday gravy or, in Cannon’s case, Sunday sauce. “We’ve always been a ‘sauce’ house,” she says, “though I have second cousins who call it gravy.” Cannon spent months making dishes and bringing them into the restaurant for the chefs to sample. Eventually, she and the Normandie team finalized a menu and held the Sunday Sauce event. The feedback following the dinner floored her. Customers told her that the eggplant parmesan or marinara was the “best they’d ever had.” For months, they asked when the next installment would be.

Now, they have an answer: Cannon will open Sunday Sauce as a permanent brick-and-mortar restaurant on N Killingsworth, opening October 23. For her, it’s a chance to get personal, and bring the comfort foods of her childhood to a warm, inviting space. She envisions a place where people can drop in for a raucous birthday dinner, a post–soccer practice meal with the family, or a solo night with some mozzarella sticks and a martini. “I want to create something familiar and beautiful and share that with my children and community,” she says.

Though Cannon has plenty of home cooking experience, she’s not a restaurant chef. To execute her vision, she’s tapped Normandie chef Isaiah Brown, whose background includes stints at Hale Pele, Flying Fish, and Seattle’s Canlis. The menu is a carryover from the pop-up, anchored by the eponymous dish that’s normally made with whatever meat is on hand—here it will often feature pork butt and short ribs, and be served over rigatoni. Those who grew up eating in New Jersey red sauce joints will see plenty of familiar faces: eggplant and chicken parmesan topped with “mutz” (mozzarella), beef and pork meatballs like the ones Cannon cooked with her uncle growing up, lobster ravioli in butter pink sauce, orecchiette with sausage and broccoli rabe. As a fun nod to Jersey’s answer to poutine, disco fries arrive here in a marsala and mushroom gravy, rather than the more common meaty “brown” gravy.

Cannon’s Portland family has their own touches, too: Her husband, Judson Winquist, Normandie co-owner and fellow East-Coaster, has his own cheesy garlic bread on the menu (which notes that he’s one-eighth Italian). Often spotted behind the bar at Normandie, Winquist—along with bar manager Anna Moss—has put together a whimsical cocktail menu with heavy 1990s vibes. That means Shirley Temples spiked with cherry vodka, peach vodka cosmopolitans with oregano tincture, and vodka martinis infused with chives and fat-washed with sour cream, the boozy equivalent of sour cream and onion chips. 

That playfulness extends to the decor as well, which Cannon calls “Pizza Hut chic”: terra-cotta pink walls, dark red channeled booths with red-and-white checkered tablecloths, banquettes with green chairs that she says remind her of what old Italian men would sit in to smoke and play cards. She refers to it as a postmodern take on East Coast trattorias.

Sunday Sauce is hardly the first Italian restaurant to open in 2025. The year has been rife with pasta shop, Italian deli, and cocktail bar openings. But Cannon promises this one will be distinct, drawing heavily from her East Coast upbringing in a large Italian American family. It’s a way for her two children to connect to the grandmother they lost, through the familial connection of cooking. And it’s a far cry from the madcap, maximalist dining of Normandie. “At my age, I want to return to things a little simpler, more joyful,” Cannon says.