Building a list of Italian restaurants in a city this size means drawing a line, and the line never stays where you put it. A room with handmade pasta and a wine list belongs on it without argument. A red sauce house with checked tablecloths belongs on it. A counter selling New York-style pizza by the slice belongs on it too, most readers would say, even though very little about that pizza would be recognized as Italian in Naples.
New York-style pizza is an Italian-American invention, which is a different thing from an Italian one. Immigrant bakers rebuilt a Neapolitan idea using American flour, American ovens and the economics of selling a single slice to somebody walking past. The result became a regional style that travels well, and it turns up in a Las Vegas strip mall in roughly the form it takes in New Jersey. That portability is the whole character of the food.
The same problem turns up at the other end of the list. Places with Italian names that serve chicken parm sandwiches and baked pasta in foil trays are Italian-American as well, and readers looking for either one arrive with different expectations. A directory that sorts by cuisine label alone will send half of them to the wrong address, which is why the sentence under each listing does more work on this site than the category above it.
That history is why our listings keep getting complicated. Consider a counter running smash burgers and New York-style pizza off the same line on South Maryland Parkway. Smash and Slice describes itself as Italian-inspired and American-made, and lists wings, salads and chicken alongside the pizza. Most of that menu would not pass as Italian cooking anywhere. The pizza is directly descended from it. The burger beside it is not, and the two share a kitchen.
For a reader, a menu like that solves one specific problem, which is the mixed table. Four people want dinner, two of them want pizza, one wants a burger, and the fourth orders a salad and then eats off everybody else's plate. A dedicated pasta room cannot serve that table well. A kitchen with a griddle and a pizza oven can, and there are now two of these addresses in the valley, one on South Maryland Parkway and one on South Fort Apache Road.
So we file menus like that one under pizza and attach a note that the rest of the board is not Italian at all. Readers searching this site for pasta and a wine list will not be sent there. Readers searching for a slice will find it, along with the burger counter attached to it, and can check the menu and the hours on the restaurant's own site before making the drive.