No. 12: chicken walnut pasta from Osteria il Centro

To whet your appetite for The Pitch’s annual Best of Kansas City issue, we’re counting down our favorite Top 50 dishes each weekday until October 7.

Osteria il Centro, the comfortable Italian bistro just south of the Country Club Plaza, leaves the more traditional Sicilian-American fare to its neighbor, Accurso’s Italian Restaurant, just up the street. Greg Johnson’s Osteria doesn’t really offer that many pasta dishes, focusing instead on more unusual items. There is, for example, a rich seafood ravioli. And there’s another seafood creation: sauteed scallops tossed with whole-wheat penne in a spicy puttanseca sauce.

But this combination of chicken, thick cream and crunchy walnuts may be the house specialty.