Have you been to Manhattan’s Little Italy lately? It’s not so much a cultural enclave as a street bazaar at meal times. It’s five blocks of restaurants, each with a pitchman out front luring you in. These eateries are lined up tooth-by-jowl, every tenement has an Italian restaurant.
They are so close that the overhead signage can confuse two restaurants. In fact, we walked into the wrong one looking to rendezvous with our daughter. When I asked if she was already seated, the waiter ignored the question and sung the praises of his food. A quick look around and I realized my mistake and went next door.
Many Italian restaurants and pizzerias—urban and suburban—are Italian in name only. In the kitchen, behind the counter, and waiting tables you’ll find mostly Hispanics. Our waiter in Little Italy was Abel and the cook also looked South of the Border. The food was very good, though! But with a few exceptions Little Italy is a tourist trap: small portions and wine at $17 a glass.
However, I learned a rare lesson: you cannot twirl spaghetti with a round fork. In all my years I’ve never come across a fork I could not master. But I was given one with a round handle that defied the one-hand twirl. Abel went missing, so I ended up scooping and wolfing down the saucy strands Chinese style.
For the Boomers among us, we’ve seen Italian food in America go from a proprietary cuisine of home cooking and family restaurants to a corporate free-for-all. Pizza went from an exotic foreign concoction—carmaker Lee Iacocca noted how growing up in Pennsylvania during the 1940s his friends first tasted pizza when his mother made it—to America’s most popular fast food. Americans eat about 3 billion pizzas every year, averaging roughly 23 pounds of pizza per person annually! On a recent cruise we took, the free pizzeria (“Sorento’s”) was open 15 hours a day churning out cheese and pepperoni slices on pre-fab (aka “cardboard”) pie dough—always a line, no matter the hour.
But pizza got away from us bigtime. Little Caesars, Jets, Pizza Hut, Domino’s, Papa John’s, and Sbarro’s are all non-Italic national pizzeria corporations. Who remembers the 15¢ slice? An entire pie for $1.20! Today, the pizza box costs more than that.
And look what happened to tomato sauce. There are hundreds of jarred sauce brands available with maybe 15 big-sellers, quality ranging from yuck to pretty good. Victoria, Rao’s, and Buitoni topped one critic’s list. All styles of sauce are now marketed, something we didn’t make at home in the olden days: Vodka, Alfredo, and Carbonara, among others. Then there are the short-lived celebrity brands to inflate the egos of minor mob-stars from The Sopranos. The late-Vincent Pastore (“Big Pussy”) and Judeo-Italic Steve Schirripa (“Bobby Baccalà”) market their own brand of “gravy” for their fans.
Pasta, or macaroni as I still call it, has been revolutionized with dozens of new shapes (Wagon Wheels, Radiatori, Campanelle, and Cascatelli/waterfall) and manufacturing gimmicks like the “Bronze die” method that roughs up the surface to hold more sauce. Dozens of Italian imports like Rummo, Garofalo, Colavita, and DeCecco all have a noticeable al dente and mouth-feel difference than American brands. To think that I was raised on mostly Ronzoni spaghetti, ziti, and rigatoni.
Before closing, we should acknowledge the recent death of Carlo Petrini, the man who founded the Slow Food Movement in 1989. He famously objected to a McDonald’s being planned for Rome’s Spanish Steps and later founded the University of Gastronomic Sciences, the first-ever university dedicated solely to the food chain. Strangely enough, the place is not a culinary school; students do not learn how to be a line cook or master restaurant kitchen techniques. The curriculum focuses on how food is produced, distributed, and sustained globally. Students take global study trips to meet farmers, producers, and artisans to understand the entire food supply chain.
Wonder if the school has a cafeteria or they order in? –JLM
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