Boston has four valuable all-alcohol licenses to give out over the next year: A North End restaurant owner is asking for two of them

Carla Gomes, who owns two Italian restaurants in the North End, today made the case why she should get two of the four all-alcohol licenses - worth an instant $600,000 or so to whoever gets them - that the Boston Licensing Board will give out over the next year, although she said she's not greedy and would be happy with just one.

While it's true city officials say they want to distribute all of the new licenses it now has - including dozens that have no resale value and meant for specific Zip codes that do not include the North End - to maximize support of unique restaurants and potential wealth generation in neighborhoods under-served by sit-down restaurants today, Gomes noted that both her restaurants are on Salem Street, which she said is completely under-served with liquor licenses, at least when compared to Hanover and North streets.

"Salem Street has two all-alcohol licenses," her attorney, Kieran Altieri, said. "There's just no oversaturation on Salem Street when it comes to alcohol licenses."

Those two licenses are twice the number of licenses in the entire neighborhood of Mattapan currently, but Altieri gave another reason the board should disregard its stated policies for doling out the new licenses it was recently awarded by the state, which he acknowledged was "the elephant in the room:" To do otherwise would risk killing the golden goose that the North End is for the entire city, or as he put it, with another animal metaphor, not giving the North End any new licenses would be like "starving the pandas at the zoo."

Tourists flock to the North End, making the neighborhood "the lifeblood of economic activity for a large part of the city," one that needs the nourishment of new licenses, he said.

Board Chairwoman Kathleen Joyce, however, remained skeptical of the need to give Gomes's Antico Forno and Terramia - which currently have beer-and-wine licenses - two of the four salable all-alcohol licenses the board can give out this year. "One might argue the North End in general might be over-saturated with Italian restaurants," she said. "This is a neighborhood that already offers a lot of Italian food."

She asked what made Gomes' versions of Italian food unique.

Gomes pointed to the unusual pizza oven Antico Forno has - it's a unique double-domed wood-fired brick oven with a floor made of Neopolitan volcanic ash, hand-built by a craftsman who flew in from Naples, which gets pizza cooked in 90 seconds or less because it reaches a temperature of 1,000 degrees. "It's not one of those packaged ovens that you get in the mail these days," she said. "There is no other oven like it in the city of Boston." Altieri said people come to the North End specifically to get Antico Forno's pizza.

Terramia, meanwhile, with just 12 tables, provides a "very intimate" environment more akin to "a little cafe in Italy" which makes it "very different from a lot of other restaurants int the North End, Altieri said.

Gomes said that were she to get the licenses - or even just one of them - she would not simply turn around and sell them. She's been running her restaurants for three decades now and wants to keep the restaurants going. She added that she has watched other North End restaurant owners - all men and none, she said, born and bred in the North End like her - get full-service licenses in years past while she was denied.

Two North End residents spoke in support of her bid. Tara Gear, who lives on Commercial Wharf, praised Gomes as somebody who "works her tail off" and who has "the total support of the community." She continued that Gomes "is just a doer, she's a force to be reckoned with," a successful restaurant operator who gives back to the community and who is "a total inspiration to women."

The licensing board is accepting applications for all the new licenses until Dec. 6, after which it will conduct a series of meetings to figure out the best restaurants to award licenses to this year - with the losers going on a waiting list for consideration in next year's round of licenses. The state legislature awarded Boston a total of 225 licenses, to be split into three annual groups for distribution.