We are proud to present our 3rd pop up dinner, “The Italian American Dream”, a culinary homage to the immigrants who settled in the Americas and shaped world culture, specifically cuisine. The event will take place the 7th and 8th of November, at 8 p.m., Tonalá 131, Colonia Roma. Tickets, $650 per person, are for sale and include a copious buffet and open wine/beer/mezcal bar.

The Italian American Dream
Legions of Italians came to the Americas at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th to pursue the American Dream. They worked, earning money to support their families. Many intended to return home and nearly half of the first-generation Italian immigrants did indeed go back to Italy.

Those who made the Americas their home, forged a distinctly Italian culture, guided by the potent ideals of family that had always been the center of life in the old country. The needs of the collective came before the individual — a value system sometimes at odds with American objective of freedom and personal choice. Unflattering stereotypes grew around Italians, fomented by Hollywood and other channels of popular cultural dissemination. Those of Italian descent had to live under a cloud of misunderstanding and prejudice; they still do.

But one powerful and more readily accepted manifestation of that Italian value system was cooking and the culture that surrounded it. And that became part of life for all Americans and beyond the US’ border as well.

Growing up in Greenwich Village
I spent most of my childhood in and around New York’s Little Italy and the heavily Italian Greenwich Village. About a third of the students in my elementary school class were newly arrived or first-generation Italians (the other third Puerto Rican which left the rest of us, Jews, blacks, WASPs etc. in the “miscellaneous” category.) The Italian kids generally kept to themselves, except when they’d spot me walking home alone: they’d make menacing remarks about my ‘invasion’ of their turf, sometimes surrounding and threatening me. I was jumped more than once, and even came home with a black eye one hot August day – I was traumatized but at the same time proud to have survived the experience. The kids may have been tough, and I certainly harbored a deep-seated prejudice against all Italians for many years, but I always knew their food was sublime.

I remember an ancient restaurant on MacDougal Street, whose black and white tiled floors were strewn with sawdust, dusty ceiling fan that had given up spinning decades before, an Edward Hopper painting come to life. My mother would send me to eat, dollar bill in tow, when she didn’t have time to cook. I’d sit in a threadbare, dark booth feasting on spaghetti and meatballs or lasagna with sausage while the elderly couple who owned the place carried on in loud, emotional Sicilian, always seeming to be in the midst of an argument. I would later learn that Sicilian always sounds like an argument, it’s the nature of the language. No food that I remember is better than that spaghetti, and none has matched its perfection since. That’s the definition of comfort food.

An industrial bakery nearby that employed non-English speaking immigrants put out their day old breads in a bin in front for old ladies to feed to the pigeons. My friends and I would grab a round and elongated one and play baseball with them.

Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, where we did much of our ‘gourmet’ shopping, was owned by the Italians. The heady aromas of baking, frying and roasting that wafted out of venerable locales, many in existence for decades, was intoxicating. On an errand to buy butter or a mozzarella from the barrel, I would pause in front of Zito’s Bakery to ogle the cannoli and pignoli cookies and take in the aroma of fresh baked bread dotted with sesame seeds. I crossed the street to avoid passing Ottomanelli & Sons Butchers because the furry rabbits and lambs hanging in the window frightened me. A small crowd of demanding shoppers always formed at the greengrocer near the corner of 6th Avenue—they quarreled in various dialects over prices and quality with first-generation attendants.

A block down, on Houston St., Raffetto’s sold fresh pasta and still does.

Every September the San Gennaro festival took place around the corner from where we lived in what is now Soho. For a few days Prince St. became a lively Italian village-like affair, like a set for an urbanized production of Cavalleria Rusticana; few tourists attended in those days. I would dart to and fro and if pocket money allowed, buy sausage and peppers—the smell of those grilling sausages, heaps of onions and green peppers sizzling away by their side, permeated the entire fair and was irresistible—and top it off with an Italian ice, that low-budget but exceedingly satisfying adaptation of gelato.

It was a privilege and honor to live in that community, like growing up in a country far from the American mainstream. It surely whetted my appetite for travel and made me the curious gastronome I am today.

The Cooking of Italy becomes American
Italian-American cooking, like Chinese and Mexican in the USA, is a product of fusion, adaptation and integration. True New World dishes were made with good ingredients, integrity and love. Cooks did not necessarily try to reproduce with veracity the food of the old countries so much as evoke those dishes as best they could.

The earliest Italian restaurants, at the end of the 19th century, served recently arrived immigrants who missed their homeland’s foods. These places caught on with a certain public open to “foreign” culture, namely artists and bohemians. The fabled, intimate Italian venues of Greenwich Village in New York, as well as in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco, became hangouts for those on the margins of society. The first non-Italian diners only experienced nominally Italian cooking. Early trattorias tended to offer safe adaptations of Neapolitan and Sicilian food like mountainous plates of spaghetti served with buckets of garlicky red sauce, minestrone soup and American main dishes like roast beef or chicken.

Later venues aimed for more authentic dishes previously unknown to the general public. New York’s Mamma Leone’s, later to become an enormous Disney-fied tourist trap, was from its inception, one of the first restaurants to offer more “authentic” dishes i.e. prepared true to old-country recipes and traditions. Before WWII it was located, uncharacteristically away from the Italian ghetto, near the old Metropolitan Opera House and attracted sophisticated Italians like Enrico Caruso offering such “exotic” fare as lasagna, ravioli and calamari.  

A majority of Italian immigrants came from the Naples area whose culinary dominion superficially extended to Sicily. Waverly Root, in ‘The Food of Italy’ explained that “...what is described abroad as ‘Italian’ cooking is really Neapolitan cooking.” Immigrants were able to eat far more meat than they ever had in the old country as it was cheaper and plentiful in America. They prepared dishes more associated with special occasions than every day fare. Many of the ingredients from back home were not available or not of good quality, so they had to adapt. Vegetables became less important over the years, reflecting trends in the broader American culinary landscape. Italian-American dishes were about abundance: lots of sauce, garlic, olive oil, cheese and meat. Hearty baked dishes like lasagna, ziti and manicotti, shrimp ‘scampi’ (a misnomer: scampi means langoustine in Italian dialect) lobster, veal scallopini were piled on home and restaurant tables.

It wasn’t until the ‘70s that chef-driven restaurants began offering regional specialties and refined European cooking to an increasingly sophisticated dining public.

It is corporate America that coopted the best-selling immigrant dishes, like pizza and panini, debasing their integrity with industrial production and low-quality ingredients in order to sell them to the masses at low prices. The Taco Bell, Panda Express and Domino’s pizza chains which practically cover the planet have promulgated “ethnic” food vastly inferior and only marginally related to the original “real thing”.

Comfort Food to be Taken Seriously
As composer Duke Ellington said “there are two kinds of music, good and bad.” I say that of food. The Italian immigrant cooks whose food I ate when growing up may have produced dishes unknown in Italy, but they made great food. “Sunday Sauce”, the special slow cooked red sauce served with meatballs, sausage or whatever else there is in the kitchen, made the weekend family gathering something special; it was standard in the Bronx, unknown in Palermo. My mouth still waters as I imagine its aroma wafting out of tenement windows as I walk by on Sunday morning. I prefer a classic New York pizza from John’s, in business since 1929—its crust sturdy and blackened, generously piled with melted cheese and dotted with sausage fragrant with fennel seeds—to the currently trendy Neapolitan/hipster version proffered at restaurants like Roberta’s.

Although I have toured Italy from north to south, make fresh pasta at home, and am a staunch traditionalist, it’s that heaping plate of spaghetti, drowning in bright red sauce with two tennis-ball sized meatballs on top that is for me the ultimate comfort food. We honor the Italian community that is made up of diverse people who fit no stereotype, and who helped make the New World what it is. What better way to do that than to take their food seriously and cook it right!

Peter Francis Battaglia, a New Yorker who dedicates a large part of his life to cooking and writing about it explains that “To me, Italian American cuisine is the joy of the original Italian immigrants who have created a bridge between their native land’s cooking but have adapted to the foods and traditions of their new country. It's a definition of gratitude, honor and celebration.”
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Here in Mexico City, I recommend the following purveyors of Italian and Italian American cooking:

Osteria 8 - great pizzas and pastas made by an authenic Italian American
Casa d’Italia - A longtime Condesa favorite specializing in Neapolitan cuisine
Sartoria - Superb artisan pastas and creative fusion dishes
Pizza Felix - refined Napolitano pizzas
Balboa Pizzeria - pizzas here are close to NY style
Maria Ciento38 - The city’s only Sicilian restaurant in a relaxed Santa Maria la Ribera patio
Vecchio Forno - Artisan pizzas
Trattoria de la Casa Nuova - Classic pastas in a merry setting in San Angel

See my post for shopping tips and more restaurants