After reinventing pizza, Italian immigrants went on to create New York’s favorite cuisine.

Here’s a news flash for you: pizza is Italian.

Not surprised? Maybe you should be. After all, Spaghetti and Meatballs is not Italian. In Italy, they are two separate dishes served as first courses, never together. They were first combined in New York City. Veal Parmigiana couldn’t be found in Italy either; it’s strictly a New York invention. No one in Italy made Manicotti, another New York concoction. Nor did they make Biscuit Tortoni, the almond-flavored dessert so popular in New York’s Italian eateries. Sausage and Peppers, as served at the city’s Italian feasts, are not served at any festival in the old country. And Pasta Primavera was invented at the restaurant Le Cirque in 1976.

Although pizza is served in Italy, especially in Naples, it bears only a passing resemblance to the pie that conquered America. Named after “pizze cavere”, which means “hot cakes” in Neopolitan dialect, pizza in Italy is smaller, personal-sized...everyone gets their own. The one true pizza in the old country is Pizza Margherita, named in honor of Queen Margherita’s visit to Napoli, and contains only tomatoes, mozzarella, olive oil and basil. That’s it; no other toppings are available (don’t bother asking for pepperoni, pineapple or pad thai.) In Italy, pizza does not come pre-sliced. It is eaten at a table, with a fork and knife...never by hand. These are the rules, and they are codified by L’Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN), which regulates the ingredients, preparation, and diameter of all pizzas.

Obviously, some changes needed to be made to this highly disciplined, sit-down meal to satisfy busy New Yorkers’ penchant for quick, on-the-go eats. That change maker was Gennaro Lombardi (see BIO), an Italian immigrant who landed in New York in 1897. Not only did Lombardi invent the coal-fired pizza oven to char his dough, he increased pizza size and cut it into slices for easy hand-eating. He also hired “pizzaiolos” (pizza makers) who went on to open their own well-known pizzerias around the city, such as Totonno’s, Patsy’s, John’s and Grimaldi’s. You can still visit every one, including Lombardi’s, and taste the pizza which started it all. (there’s another bio link at the end of this chapter)

For decades, pizza remained a specialty only within Italian neighborhoods. The New York Times had to define pizza for its uninformed readers as “a circular mixture of dough, cheese, sauce, and Italian lore.” After World War II, G.I.s returned home with a taste for the foods they had sampled in Europe. That’s when the tomato and cheese pie really took off. There are tasty “New York Style” pizzas to be found in Italian enclaves such as Trenton, Boston, and especially in New Haven, Connecticut, where battles over the best “apizza” (as they call it) are waged between Pepe’s, Sally’s and Modern pizzerias, as they have since the 1930’s.

In New York City, there are as many different pizzas as there are pizzerias; each place has its own style, its own ingredients, its own secret recipes, and its own pizzaiolo. There are pizza parlors on almost every street, many in each neighborhood; chances are your favorite slice comes from your friendly nearby pizza joint. Unfortunately, pizza has become big business, and some Americans only know Hut or Domino “pizza”, (or, even worse, frozen pizza) which are the same everywhere.

Another distinguishing characteristic of New York City pizza is the folded slice. It’s the only way to munch pizza on the go. Just make sure you fold your slice correctly (see diagram 1-A).

Ciao, Italiani 

Most iconic New York foods represent a people, a neighborhood, a culture. They are each a part of the wider story of the most diverse place on Earth. They taste of the struggle, courage, inventiveness and tenacity of thousands of families and their subsequent generations. Pizza is one of those foods with “memories.”

I suppose you could say that an Italian was the first European to reach the New York area. In 1524, Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed into the lower bay, 85 years before Henry Hudson, but never got any further than the narrow strait which is named for him. He thought New York Harbor was a lake, and left. Too bad, Gio.

There were few Italians during the city’s first 250 years. The explosive growth of immigration came later. The 1850 census listed less than 4,000 Italians in the entire country. By 1910, there were half a million in New York City alone. By 1924, more than 4 million Italians had arrived on New York’s shores...20% of all New Yorkers were from an Italian background.

Like the Irish, Germans and Eastern Europeans, Italian immigrants were escaping the extreme poverty and political upheavals in their homeland. Most were landless laborers from southern Italy, bringing with them their “foodways”: the use of tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, pasta, cheeses and cured meats in their cooking. These became the ingredients that most Americans associate with Italian food. 

Many Italians settled on the Lower East Side, between the Bowery and Broadway, which became (and remains) “Little Italy”. Still fiercely loyal to their original municipalities, Little Italy was subdivided into areas for families from Sicily, or Naples, or Calabria, Genoa, Puglia, etc. Director Martin Scorcese grew up on Elizabeth Street in a tenement comprised of families from one particular Sicilian village. He recalled that when someone from his building married a person from a neighboring building with folks from a different Sicilian village, it was considered a “mixed marriage”.

Like other immigrants, Italians took on the lowliest jobs. Many started out as peanut vendors. Others hauled pushcarts through the streets, selling Italian staples such as eggplants, peppers, zucchini and basil. Peddlers then opened Italian groceries, which were also cafés, serving coffee and macaroni while selling onions and sausages. They were neighborhood gathering places, alive with gossip, business talk, and family activity. Soon over 100 of them were scattered through Little Italy and northward into Greenwich Village, where the Italian community had expanded. By the 1930s, Italians ran 10,000 grocery shops, 875 butcher shops, and 1,150 restaurants in the city. Italian had become New York’s favorite ethnic cuisine.

Several Italian immigrants made it into the big-time food business. Emanuele Ronzoni, who arrived from Italy in 1881, started making pasta in a small factory on Canal Street in 1895. His business grew so much that he built a fully mechanized pasta plant on Vernon Avenue, near the Queensboro Bridge, and became one of the largest pasta makers in the United States. Joseph and Angela Kresivich, immigrants from Trieste, Italy, started baking cookies, breadsticks and biscotti in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. Their Stella D’oro Biscuit Company expanded in the late 1940s to a new bakery, and became the nation’s largest family-owned cookie maker. Since their baked goods contained no milk or butter, they were a big hit with Kosher Jewish households. Ettore Boiardi, a former chef at the Plaza Hotel, produced canned food for soldiers during World War II. At the war’s end he came up with the idea of canning cooked spaghetti, changing his name to the more pronounceable “Chef Boy-ar-dee”. He sold millions of cans of cooked pasta.

“Red Ink” to Roman Forums 

By the 1890s New Yorkers has fallen in love with small Italian restaurants, with their checkered tablecloths, candles stuck in chianti bottles, and cheap red wine (which lent the name “red ink joints”). Many were located in the former French Quarter, south of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, and were favored by the Bohemians (poets, painters and radical thinkers.)  Basement haunts like Moretti’s, Gonfarone’s, Mori’s and Grace Godwin’s offered “table d’hote” dinners for 50 cents, including wine and opera-singing waiters, perfect for their clientele of starving artists.

Although Italian enclaves began to spring up in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and East Harlem, many New Yorkers still found Italian cuisine foreign and mysterious. A 1920s guidebook defined spaghetti as “a serpentine food that draws the innocent and unwary into its maze of intricacies.” Nevertheless, Italian eateries gained a foothold throughout the city, eventually leading to huge palaces like Murray’s Roman Gardens (featuring “ancient” statues and a 30-foot fountain), Mamma Leone’s (where many had their first taste of Italian food), and the over-the-top Forum of the Twelve Caesars (featuring waiters in togas serving flaming “Crab a la Nero”.) That’s a long way from 50-cent spaghetti. But we also got Sardi’s, Barbetta, Rao’s, Felidia and Parm, so who’s complaining?

The MGM Grand in Las Vegas once boasted it served “Italian food so authentic, you’ll swear you’re in New York!” Not in Italy, in New York. I think that says it all.

Savoring the hood 

If you consider yourself Italian-American, it’s likely that one or more of your ancestors passed through Ellis Island and lived in an Italian neighborhood while they learned the language and customs of their new home. One can imagine what it was like to walk through the tenement-lined streets of Little Italy a century ago: You would see Moe Albanese in his butcher shop, and wave hello to Joe Parisi, the baker. Perhaps you’d stop into Concetta Di Palo’s shop to pick up some imported pancetta and provolone. The aroma of mozzarella being smoked would entice you into Pina Alleva’s dairy. Some fresh pasta to take home from Piemonte Ravioli and a quick espresso at Tony Ferrara’s or Caffe Roma would be nice. Or one could wander into the Village to Pasticceria Rocco’s, Caffe Reggio, or Caffe Dante for a granita and a cannoli. If it’s September, there would be a “must visit” to the Feast of San Gennaro, stretching along the entire length of Mulberry Street, to hear brass bands playing old Sicilian marching tunes, pin a dollar onto the saint’s statue, drink some vino, and enjoy heaping platters of food. (Select to enlarge:)

You can still have this experience, because every one of the above establishments, plus many more, are still in existence, looking much as they did a century ago, mostly operated by the descendents of the original owners. Trust me, I’ve lived in the neighborhood for over forty years. There is still a Little Italy. It may be “littler” now, but it’s just as evocative as when your forebearers were alive. The red ink joints are still here. The tenements and San Gennaro are here too. Moe Albanese’s granddaughter now runs his butcher store. Come and mangiare!