When you eat with Salvatore Lembo, you’ve got to know three things:

Garlic.

Tomatoes.

Extra-Virgin Olive Oil.

You’re now ready to eat like an Italian.

Lembo should know. The owner of Firenze Ristorante Italiano and Pizzaria Guido and Wine Bar at Crossroads Bellevue has been fine-tuning his touch in the kitchen since he was a child in Sicily and later growing up in Florence, Italy.

In the 17 years he has owned Firenze, he has seen customers become regulars and regulars become friends. As he says, people like to sit down with someone they know at a restaurant.

So, let’s sit.

Bread is the staff of life and both restaurants bake their own in Guido’s wood-fired pizza oven. The crunchy crust opens up to reveal bread ready to dip into olive oil. One of the three things – remember.

Without asking, Lembo will add a shake or two of salt to the plate. Maybe next, he’ll summon some fresh pesto to add to the flavor. The pesto contains garlic – another of the three things.

You’re on your way.

‘We like the simple stuff,” Lembo says of his countrymen. “Simple stuff is healthier and the best.”

If it’s dinner, that means starting with a small appetizer, adding a modest pasta dish and following it up with the main course and a salad.

The portions should be small, Lembo believes, so there’s no waste. At home, he even saves bits of leftover bread for the birds.

The ingredients? From Italy, of course, including the meats he serves and the pasta for his dishes.

That goes for the wine, too, including one wine with his own name on the bottle.

Which brings up another element of Italian eating – the wine. It should accompany meals, even for children, he says. Not as much as the parents have, of course, but a little, perhaps with some water in it.

Another important element to eating like an Italian is time. Some recipes take longer to cook than others, Lembo says, so a waiter should explain that to customers who see people at other tables eating before they do. It takes time to do a sauce reduction, he added, especially if you cook everything from scratch, as he does.

Lembo has been at the helm of Firenze for 17 years. He still makes yearly trips back to Italy to check out food and wine to add more recipes, all of them authentic, to the menu.

And speaking of eating like an Italian, Lembo says don’t be afraid to ask a server for suggestions or even something not on the menu.

“That’s what they (chefs) live for,” he said.