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Here is an easily digestible book excerpt....
This is the first dozen pages from my electronic book, From the Antipasto to the Zabaglione - The Story of Italian Restaurants in America. If you like Italian - everyone does, of course - and are slightly curious about it, this makes for a very enjoyable and quick read that happens to be very thoroughly researched. Plus, it's only $2.99 on Amazon and at bn.com.
Introduction
This book, rather, booklet is part of a larger book entitled, Eating Italian in America – The Story of the Country’s Favorite Food, from Red Sauce to White Truffles. More accurately, this is part of a larger book project, as Eating Italian in America is not yet finished. Its work remains at a standstill as I decide how to proceed with it.
The idea for the book came to me in the first half of 2008. The investigation into this surprisingly broad subject has been progressing in fits and starts since then. This booklet is somewhat of an excerpt of that broader project, and one that I was using to show off the work-in-progress. It was written in the summer of 2010, subsequently updated. I thought to make it available as an electronic book because I was stuck in my attempts to complete the rest of the book, and believed that it might be a good idea to have this rather self-contained portion available because it is a good read, and might be of interest to legions of fans of Italian food and dining. These restaurants have provided a tremendous amount of enjoyment across the country for well over a century, after all.
The result, this booklet, is about a third or less of what I intend to eventually cover; there is a lot more to Italian food in this country than the story of Italian-themed restaurants. But, it is an appealing tale in its own right, and one that has not yet been fully told. The amount of research done for a broader outline, with much of it contained in this relatively brief now 35,000-words-or-so edition, should be quite evident. Hopefully, not too evident, as it is meant to be a fun read, not just for those attracted to the history of food, but nearly everyone who enjoys reading something in addition to a menu.
This fairly concise tome follows the food of the Italian immigrants from port cities, Bohemian enclaves and the early cheap, table d’hôte eateries through the appearance of spaghetti and meatballs and the development of a recognizable Italian-American cooking, with which America fell in love, to the introduction of fine-dining then alta cucina, sleek trattorias, regionally inspired spots and beyond. It is an enjoyable saga, the history of Italian restaurants in America.
These establishments have been more influential than most realize. Italian restaurants have introduced foods and dishes, and codified Italian preparations for diners and home cooks. The osso buco, veal Parmesan, saltimbocca, Caesar salad, tiramisu and many others you might have prepared at home are not the result of any Italian home-cooking tradition but are dishes that first appeared in restaurants and made the transition to the home kitchen. The restaurants at the cutting-edge – the focus a fair portion of this story – have introduced dishes and products that are imitated and translated by the other establishments. It might take a decade for their creations that have struck a chord with the public to filter all the way down, maybe less in this hyper-connected world, but the famed, truly innovative restaurants usually have an influence well beyond the customers they have served. The direction of Italian food in this country has been set largely by these places.
A good portion of the action takes place in New York, specifically Manhattan. As the point of entry for most immigrating Italians, it was also was where many stopped, as the city has long had a greater number of Italians than any other metropolitan area in the country. Coupled with the fact that New York has been the nation’s leading restaurant city – save for a decade or so – since at least the first half of the 19th century when New York was Manhattan, it should not be surprising that much of the story of the Italian restaurant in America is the story of the Italian restaurant in New York. Its importance stretches well beyond the spread “New York-style pizza” to all types of Italian restaurants.
Well beyond the five boroughs, the range of types of Italian restaurants is indicative how much a part of the American landscape these are: pizza joints, sub shops, Italian delis, panini purveyors, espresso stops, Italian ice stands, gelato shops, Italian-themed wine bars, and full-service restaurants at every level of formality, ambition and price. But, one of the most interesting things about Italian restaurants in this country is that hardly any are truly Italian.
“The air was thick with the scents of garlic, onions and Parmesan. It was also loud with song – specifically, opera”
- Frank Bruni, New York Times, at Tommaso in Brooklyn in 2006
The Italian Restaurant, an American Institution
Italian restaurants have been an especially beloved fixture in America for at least a century. Featuring flying pizzas, slippery strands of spaghetti paired with plump meatballs that most have savored since childhood, tomato sauce ladled and consumed by the pint, garlickly and buttered toasted bread quick to leave a grease stain, tender slices of veal, gooey eggplant Parmesan, gregarious owners, the air filled with Sinatra and Martin or Verdi and Donizetti, a lively and comfortable dining room, generous mounds of food, copious amounts of wine….one from this cluttered group of images might be the first evoked in the average American concerning Italian food. There is much than more that, of course. Italian restaurants come in many guises these days, adapting to an ever-changing and -growing dining landscape, if seemingly always well-suited for the ever-growing waistlines. Today there are various different types that wave the banner of Italian food: sleek trattorias advertising a regional cuisine, national chains serving “Italian immigrant” fare, “Italian grilles,” long-lasting family-run favorites owned by a second- or third generation, Italian steakhouses, pizzerias, creative fine-dining temples that rival the top Michelin-starred restaurants in Italy, and even the humble hoagie shops.
In one or more of its manifestations, Italian restaurants remain a common sight across the country. Serving as an introduction to Italian food for many, these have encouraged life-long infatuations, not just for the food served in these, but for food in general. Italian restaurants have also helped to broaden the palate of countless diners. This is probably especially so for Italian-Americans, who explored beyond a familiar base. With about 30% of diners claiming Italian as their favorite cuisine, new Italian-themed eateries continuing to open from coast-to-coast, and even French and resolutely American restaurants serving pastas and risottos, this popularity shows no sign of abating, even as Americans become more sophisticated and far-ranging in their dining habits. Reflecting that, Italian restaurants are even better than ever. These are also more diffuse and diverse, and continue to evolve. Casonsei, crudo and culaletto might be more frequently used than carbonara and cannoli in the savvy diners’ lexicon, one that began decades ago with a few terms like spaghetti and spumoni.
The First Italian Restaurants in America
Spaghetti and spumoni weren’t served at the first Italian restaurants in this country. These were opened by the 1860s in the big port cities like New York, New Orleans and San Francisco. Immigration from Italy totaled roughly 70,000 in all the years prior to 1880, mostly from the northern Italian regions of Liguria, Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto and Tuscany. These newcomers were largely craftsmen, merchants and entrepreneurs and their families. The restaurants and food stores they founded existed to serve the rather small immigrant communities while providing an ongoing livelihood for their proprietors. This usually necessitated attracting non-Italians. The early restaurants served straightforward fare inspired mostly by the home-cooking of their northern homes, soups, fish, and roasts, likely buttressed by additional meats and seafood that were more available and affordable in the New World. It was not exactly what they had at home. The cooking had to be adapted to local ingredients.
The future menu staples of spaghetti and spumoni were unknown to the first restaurateurs unless they had spent time in Naples. Italy in the late 19th century was newly united and had nothing approaching a national cuisine. There were scores of cuisines that varied from town to town and region to region. From the extremes of the peninsula, the foods could be dramatically dissimilar. As great as the differences are, the foods of the many regions and cities were much closer to each other than to those of other cuisines. The foods of Genoa were much different from that of Palermo, and even nearby Turin, but these would have held a level of similarity to any other Italian fare that did not exist with the foods of Hungary, Germany, or America. Though there was not – and still is not – a national Italian cuisine, the phrase “Italian cuisine” or truer to the vernacular, “Italian food” still made sense.
The earliest restaurants and those in the ensuing decades were not conscious replications of eateries in Italy. In theme these might have reflected the simple osterie or trattorie that served the small number of travelers in Italian cities and towns. The food was dependent upon the new locale and whims and skills of the proprietor and chef. Campi's Italian and Swiss Restaurant first opened in San Francisco around 1859. It was for many years one of the burgeoning city’s best, most frequented and “cosmopolitan” restaurants. In Manhattan Moretti was a well-known establishment that began possibly as early as the 1850s by a native of Vincenza, a city west of Venice. It was known a couple of decades later for the quality and quantity of its cooking that was “always accompanied by a very fine risotto.” One of its four successively more northerly addresses chasing well-heeled patrons was near both Tammany Hall and the Academy of Music and its Italian singers. The restaurant attracted distinguished guests including the Prince of Wales in its prolonged heyday, which seemed to last into the new century. An article announcing the proprietor’s final retirement home to Italy in 1903 cited customers mourning that its “famous risotto and kidneys was beyond their reach forever.” It might seem unusual that this rice dish that became popular on menus again in the 1990s would have “famous” associated with it. Another renowned and long-lasting food establishment that also began in the 1860s was Solari’s in New Orleans. Founded by immigrants from around Genoa, it was primarily an importer and dry goods store that also served meals during the day. Described as “one of the nation’s finest grocery stores” by Clementine Paddleford in Gourmet magazine even nine decades later, Solari’s deli counter was a longtime institution for breakfast and lunch for those residing or working in the French Quarter and nearby Central Business District.
“The foremost of the Italian table d'hôte restaurants was Martinelli,” a rival to Morretti at the top of the Italian heap in Manhattan during the 1880s. Martinelli was a frequent host to banquets for alumni groups, military fraternities, and political organizations with prominent guest lists that were regularly reported in the local papers. The table d’hôte referred to a fixed multi-course meal that might have changed daily, or at least regularly. It was a popular option in most restaurants at the time. In 1885 the New York Times described this segment of the dining landscape in Manhattan:
“there are….about 25 places where foreign cookery, mainly Italian, is dispensed at figures ranging from 30 cents per caput - without wine - to $1.25 with wine. In the most inexpensive establishments dinner is served at 6, and the habitués sit at a long table being expected to assemble toward the same hour. This….is the real table d’hôte system, but it only prevails where the dinners are cheapest….The 30-cent dinner habitually includes soup, fish, an entrée, a roast, and a cup of coffee, macaroni occasionally substituted for the meat entrée. The dishes are invariably highly flavored…tough or unsavory viands, however, are unknown.”
The wine served was often familiar names, if tasting a little differently than today, “Chianti … Barbera…Barolo” that the owner himself had imported, a profitable side business. Later, as the northern Californian wine industry got up to speed (with considerable help from Italian immigrants), the wine would more likely be from the west coast, certainly for the set-price meal. Reported in the New York Sun in 1905 about the typical Italian restaurant on New York’s immigrant lower west side that, “the wine, indeed, is mainly from California…often served with seltzer and red.” This preference for light sparkling wine continued for a while. An article several years later recounted the wines typically served, half some sort of “spumante.”
In California, a 25¢ table d’hôte at Coppa’s in San Francisco before the earthquake in 1906 consisted of salad, pasta, entrée, sourdough bread, black coffee, and a bottle of wine. Especially at Coppa’s, meals and prices like that made it popular with patrons well beyond those who had recently sailed from Italy.
Some restaurants complemented the table d’hôte meal with a menu, à la carte service. Fior d’Italia, about the fanciest of the ten or so restaurants in the Italian section of San Francisco, offered mostly choices from a menu. Founded in 1886 by a native of Liguria, within a decade he had partnered with other paesani and a Tuscan providing the resources of several families that helped to sustain its success, which lasted for many decades. On its 30th anniversary, the restaurant boasted of having served an astounding 15 million meals, which averages to 1,400 per day. It sat 750 people at the time. Fior d’Italia is still open today, the nation’s longest-operating Italian restaurant. Items from a concise menu from its inaugural year, written in English, were risotto with clams, tortellini Bologna, veal cutlets, veal scaloppini, veal sauté, chicken sauté (25¢ versus 5¢ for the veal version), broiled chicken, fritto misto, tenderloin steak, porterhouse for two, calf’s brains, calf’s liver, and the two most expensive individual items at 40¢, squab casserole and frog’s legs, plus the “Special Dinner with Wine” for 35¢.
By the turn of the 20th century, both New York and San Francisco had a number of thriving Italian restaurants. New York was unique in the country. It was both the point of entry for nearly all arriving Italians, almost 97%, and where a significant percentage found a paycheck and a home. New York had the greatest concentration of Italians, and, by far, the largest number of restaurants. Italian restaurants became even more common sights in the first quarter of the 20th century, especially in Manhattan, as the flood of immigrants from Italy provided masses of potential customers. Of the nation’s 2.1 million Italians recorded in the 1910 census, both foreign and native born, over a quarter resided in New York City, more than 540,000. There were tens of thousands just across the river in northern New Jersey, too. It was natural that New York, specifically its commercial center, Manhattan, is where the Italian restaurant did most of its development from its earliest days through today.
The Italian Restaurant Evolves as Immigration Increases
“The cheapness of the Italian restaurants is one of the features of their present renaissance…The average price of an Italian table d’hôte dinner to-day is half as much [as in the 1880s],” reported the New York Sun in late 1908 in a piece entitled “The March of the Italian Chef.” Five years later, the New York Times quoted a frequent customer as saying, “One can go into any one of them and obtain a delightful meal for from 30 and 60 cents.” Though that did not include wine, it was to be had for “very little, from 50 to 60 cents a quart.” So, for between $7 and $15 in 2011 dollars, diners could enjoy a meal featuring several courses, and could add plentiful wine for just another $6 to $7. Most Italian restaurants remained inexpensive, even less expensive on average than a quarter century before.
Helping to keep prices low at these restaurants, among other things, was the pace and nature of immigration from Italy. It ramped up considerably, from 12,000 a year in 1880 to 52,000 in 1890 to 100,000 in 1900, and reaching a peak of 285,000 in 1907. These were all potential new customers, and in these numbers were many new restaurant owners, too. The new immigrants were largely unattached men, both single and those who had left families back in Italy, who came with plans to make money for a homestead and return to Italy rather than settle. Over 80% of immigrants from Italy were men, with a big portion officially immigrating more than once. This was fairly unique among the European immigrants. Nearly all of the Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, Slavs and Jews who traveled from their native lands knew they were leaving for good. But, without a wife and family by their side, these Italian men needed to be fed outside of home. Many of the newest Italian restaurants, both in New York and more so elsewhere, were really just dining rooms in boarding houses serving men without families who labored during the day. A large number were the cheap table d’hôte establishments described above. Though all immigrants preferred the familiar foods of their homelands, the preference of the Italians notably exceeded that of nearly every other group. The Kasruth-adhering Ashkenazi Jews might have been the exception. A New York paper noted in 1903, “No people are more devoted to their native foods than the Italians.” And, there was the sufficient critical mass in most immigrant areas for them to expect Italian food to be cooked for them somewhere nearby.
The multitudes of working-class customers provided demand for thousands of low-priced Italian eateries across the country. Nearly all of these restaurants had to be inexpensive, as its core customer base was laborers. A deep recession caused by the Panic of 1907 lasting until 1910 helped keep a lid on prices even as immigration from Italy dropped by nearly half for a couple of years. This economic distress might have made cheap restaurants even cheaper as the Sun and Times pieces above note. Another very important factor keeping these eminently affordable was that the general dining public was just not ready for pricey Italian restaurants. The Sun wrote in that late 1908 article, quoting an Italian restaurant owner, “Americans who are willing to pay large sums do not want exclusively Italian dishes. They insist upon having so many French and American things.” Italian restaurants were not considered fine dining, even when Moretti was one of the very best Italians some years earlier. “There was little or no attention paid to service and the incidental features of the meal were not attractive,” remembered a manager of a leading restaurant in that piece. This contrasted sharply with the leading French restaurants, which were run by those who had trained to be in the restaurant business, as had their chefs. “Later he [Moretti] moved uptown, and met with failure there,” since the wealthier, non-Italian demographic he was chasing would not pay his prices, which were as much as $1.25 for a full meal with wine. “The Italian dinner had distinctly passed out of the dollar class [by the early 1900s in New York]…That is paid nowadays for the French table d’ hôte, but not for the Italian, which must be considered as standing on a cheaper basis.” This belief lasted in the minds of most diners until today in some markets. Italian restaurants had long been inexpensive, and never as polished as the top restaurants.
Affordability was just one part of the appeal, though. “It is the excellent taste of the food in addition to its price,” continued the 1908 article in Sun. Cheapness coupled with exuberant and easily enjoyable flavor had already become a hallmark, at least in New York. To these attractions was another one that contrasted with brusqueness of the male-dominated oyster parlors and chop houses, the polished, professional service of the French and hotel restaurants, and the concern for providing simply basic functionality elsewhere. This was spelled out in a tome about Chicago’s dining landscape some years later, and meaningful throughout the country, “the atmosphere is typically Italian - which, in other words, means hospitable.”
That fixed menu table d’hôte concept, long popular for most restaurants, continued to make it easier for non-Italian customers to order, analogous to the present-day lunch buffet at Indian restaurants across the country. The Sun article continued:
“What the Italian restaurant does is put the dishes that appeal to New York tastes on the bill of fare of the table d’hôte. That suffices to please those who want something of the ordinary kind of food with a liberal allowance of what is peculiarly Italian… while the uncompromising Italians are able to get what they want by ordering it…’In that way all my patrons will be pleased,’” according to an Italian restaurateur.
In these more mixed areas, restaurants catered to both Italian and non-Italians, alike. Many restaurants served solely Italian patrons. “In those downtown neighborhoods that assure them a distinctively Italian patronage the table d’hôte is unknown… [they] offer a list of dishes not changed by the least intrusion of American ideas.”
Reflecting the diet of their homeland, especially for the multitudes of southern Italians, but odd for restaurants in America at the time, vegetables held a special place in the Italian restaurants. “You find no better vegetables anywhere than are served in reputable but cheap Italian restaurants… tomatoes, eggplant and peppers are especially good. They also do Lyonnaise potatoes admirably,” and “salads are almost always good,” reported the New York Sun in a piece geared toward the city’s adventurous diner in 1909, “The Italian Cook's Best - Dishes to Choose When You Eat His Fare.” In what was later to be the calling card of these eateries and a big ingredient in the success, the “Italian cook…can beat anybody in the world in making tomatoes richly palatable.”
The products of the garden might not have fully interested the non-Italian, and in a typical restaurant for the “meat entrée you have a pretty wide choice of kidneys, liver, veal in many forms, tripe and nondescript stews.” An article the previous year counseled that “the knowing person who goes to an Italian restaurant would never think of ordering beef or chicken.” The costs of excellent beef and chicken then were too much for these inexpensive restaurants, which could only afford inferior quality for the very low meal prices they were charging. “Italian steaks are cheap, but apt to be tough,” reflecting both the aversion to the necessary expense for quality and the Italian-bred cooks and patrons’ initial unfamiliarity or indifference with it. “Veal, lamb, and good giblets, on the other hand, are much cheaper,” and were much more apt to be served in an appropriately savory fashion. These became menu staples for decades. Veal, especially, is where these early 20th century Italian restaurants shined. In its various forms “the veal will be better than any they can find elsewhere in New York,” something that likely continues.
The owners of these restaurants might have still largely been those first immigrants who were from the northern Italy in New York, but four-fifths of the newer arrivals were from the regions south of Rome and Sicily. What they ate at these restaurants was usually recognizable from home. Much of it was foods that were less affordable and less available before emigrating: pasta, meat and fish. Some of the fare usually included “minestrone,” “fried flounder,” “ossa boco [sic],” and “veal cutlet…à la Milanaise with cepes.” There was also “spaghetti and macaroni…served with a meat sauce…or with cheese or tomatoes” that were common items at these restaurants by 1908. Those from the south and Sicily were not familiar with the osso buco or vitello alla Milanese that graced many bills-of-fare, and most could not afford it on a regular basis, anyway. They knew the inexpensive pasta, though. As had the majority of the customers, restaurant offerings were going to change.
Italian Restaurants in Bohemia
Interestingly, Italian restaurants found new non-Italian patrons in the sections of several large cities that were homes to a critical mass of creative types beginning in the late 19th century. This was most notable in New York’s Greenwich Village. “The Italian restaurants of Bohemia numbered in the dozens…. All of them served virtually identical food. They were located in private houses, with a dining room and small bar on the ground floor and a kitchen in the back, where the owner's wife did the cooking,” from Appetite City, a history of dining in New York. This was odd, on its face, given the fact that most Italian immigrants and restaurateurs were uneducated, sometimes even illiterate, and quite conservative befitting their peasant backgrounds from isolated small towns and villages, some of the most backward places in Europe. These were lands far removed from the outlooks and lifestyles of the artistic communities of the country’s largest cities.
The artist- and bohemian-heavy Greenwich Village was also home to many Italians and adjacent to Little Italy. This proximity was necessitated by the fact that both the artists and immigrant Italians were dependent upon low rents. The attraction for a starving artist of these nearby eateries was easily understood: “a spaghetti dinner was cheap, filling, and redolent of good flavors not to be found elsewhere,” as described in a lively gastronomic history of this country, American Food. Inexpensive and plentiful wine also helped, and likely the fact that many Italians themselves were musicians, singers and artisans. The Latin Quarter in San Francisco, later known as North Beach, was another famous spot for bohemian diners that lasted at least through the end of the era of the Beats in the 1960s. In Chicago “Tower Town [from the nearby landmark Water Tower], the Greenwich Village or the Latin Quarter, lies across the river on the near north side” was home to several popular Italian restaurants since the 1880s according to a Chicago restaurant guide published in 1931. Not just in the largest cities was the mutual affinity of the artistic community and Italian restaurants to be found. Ciro & Sal’s in Provincetown, Massachusetts at the tip of Cape Cod that opened in the mid-1950s was long a popular spot for vacationing literary lights and artists of nearly every stripe including Eugene O’Neill, Norman Mailer, Claes Oldenburg, Marc Rothko and Andy Warhol.
The 1920s Brings Restrictions on Wine and Italians
The 1920s brought two changes that greatly affected the Italian restaurants: laws that greatly slowed immigration from Italy and Prohibition. Xenophobia against many of the newcomers was even reflected in scholarly quarters. Edward Alsworth Ross, Professor of Sociology at the ostensibly progressive University of Wisconsin – and a founder of American sociology and President of the American Sociological Society in 1914-1915 – wrote in a trade book about immigration in 1914 that unless the flood of “gross little aliens” from “the backward and benighted provinces from Naples to Sicily” was sharply diminished, America, “must in the end resign itself to lower efficiency, to less democracy, or to both.” This sentiment was held widely enough for two pieces of legislation restricting the tide of immigration from Italy. The Quota Act of 1921 limited its immigration to 3% annually of their population in the 1910 census. The Johnson-Reed Act in 1924 further reduced the new arrivals from southern and eastern Europe to 2% of the 1890 census. Immigration from Italy had slowed to a trickle when the Great War reached it furious conclusion as Germany exhausted itself and the even deadlier influenza epidemic beginning in 1918 infected a fifth of the world's population and killed around 50 million people. The pace of newcomers from Italy increased in 1920 and reached a last peak of 220,000 in 1921 before declining to around 50,000 per annum for a few years before the quotas took full effect. There were just 6,000 immigrants from Italy in 1925. The number averaged 15,000 for several years afterwards, a far cry from before.
With fewer immigrants, many of the boarding houses that had catered to them opened restaurants or transformed into restaurants to survive. And, many restaurants began to more actively seek non-Italian customers. Most meaningful, though, was that the lifeline to Italy was almost completely severed. The Depression and war continued to limit the number of new Italians, and, so, current Italian trends. The Italian restaurants in America had to develop independently of Italy, almost necessarily. There was not much in the way of Italian restaurant models to follow, anyway. The best and most current Italian cooking during that time was done in the aristocratic households, and experience and knowledge of it was rather limited. The top restaurants in Italy were in the grand hotels in the biggest cities and in the spa and resort towns that catered to an international group. These did not serve much in the way of Italian food, it was French, and these even conducted business largely in French.
Italian restaurants in the 1920s in this country had to do without Italian wines, and also domestic wines, for that matter, at least officially. The temperance movement had been around for decades, the product of well-meaning if hopelessly misdirected Protestant moralists, led by the Methodist church. It gained greater momentum during the First World War as anti-German sentiment grew (twenty-plus states enacted laws against using German in public meetings or school), and was directed against the country’s brewing industry, which was entirely Germanic. A distinct lack of coordination and effort among the various organizations comprised of those businesses making, distributing and selling alcoholic beverages made for a surprisingly ineffective opposition. Racist sentiment in the South (which included the widely brandished image of black men fueled by gin posing a threat to white womanhood), anti-Jewish feelings, as Jewish merchants handled much of the liquor trade there, and anti-immigrant feelings were also significant aspects of the late anti-alcohol movement. These and other factors led to the passing of the laws that resulted in Prohibition. This went into effect nationwide in January, 1920. With it, the making, selling and transportation of alcoholic beverages was prohibited. For most Italian restaurateurs, this was potentially calamitous. Wine was a nearly necessary accompaniment to an Italian meal, certainly so for the immigrants. It was so ingrained that it was common for Italians to begin drinking wine, in diluted fashion, as children.
Most Italians still drank wine. There was a provision in the Prohibition prohibitions that allowed for up to 200 gallons of wine to be made at home. Prohibition was certainly an incentive for even more American Italians to make wine, if they were not doing so already. “In 1917, when wine was legal, Americans consumed 70 million gallons – imported, domestic, and homemade. By 1925 Americans were drinking 150 million gallons of just the homemade stuff,” reported in Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Bootleggers and restaurants provided a ready – if not legal – market for those homemade wines. The supply existed, as 200 gallons was far more than a typical household would need, in almost any case.
Most Italian restaurants continued to provide wine, though usually surreptitiously. Like many other places, San Francisco’s Fior d’Italia poured it in coffee cups to deflect attention, which worked for a while. But constant harassment from authorities caused it to eventually cease serving wine. With decreased business the restaurant moved in 1929 to smaller quarters that were able to accommodate about a quarter the number of diners than before, about 200. Though Prohibition made normal operations more difficult for Italian eateries, it killed nearly all of the fine-dining restaurants in the country. The better restaurants had always relied on selling wine and liquor to be profitable. And, people wanted to drink during the 1920s as they always had. So, they often visited the speakeasies rather than those high-end restaurants that did not serve alcohol. More so, “restaurants that stayed dry were doomed not just because of public tastes, but also by labor economics: because tips in speakeasies were so much larger, so was the earning power of their waiters and chefs; this attracted the best in the business,” according to Last Call. The demise of top restaurants spelled the end of any culture of fine dining and a certain level of appreciation of food in general throughout America, a dearth that lasted at least a generation. The ensuing Depression and Second World War prolonged its absence.
Though an almost requisite part of the Italian meal was officially prohibited, Prohibition might have been beneficial for many Italian restaurants. According to Mary Grozvenor Ellsworth in the book Much Depends on Dinner not long after the fact in 1939, “Prohibition…had a great deal to do with the introduction of Italian food to the masses… The Italians who opened up speakeasies by the thousand were our main recourse in time of trial. Whole hordes of Americans thus got exposed regularly and often to Italian food....” Its affordability and quality, especially compared to that offered at other nightspots with their “lackluster speakeasy cuisine,” were big factors. And, not incidentally, even for the non-speakeasies, while wine was officially banned, it certainly was not banished from most Italian eateries. Nearly all had much lower profiles than the famed Fior. The Chicago dining guide from 1931 even gives a primer on wine early in the book. The most prevalent variety at the Italian restaurants then, though, was, “Dago Red…a very cheap concoction parading under the name of wine.” This Dago Red had been a thriving “brand name” for at least a couple of decades by then (and proved to be more enduring than “Chateau la Feet” that had gained some traction in the Bay Area). Poorly made wine – often by immigrant laborers and tradesmen operating in basements and tenements – coarsely named, was a greater attraction than no wine at all.
Prohibition and the new immigration policies had slowed, but did not stop the inexorable growth in the number of Italian restaurants. By the end of the first decade of 20th century, the Italian establishments in Manhattan had begun to move uptown from the downtown neighborhoods of Little Italy and Greenwich Village. More opened up in neighborhoods where Italians moved in great numbers; East Harlem in Manhattan, which became the largest Italian-American enclave in the country, Belmont in the Bronx and Bensonhurst, Williamsburg and Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn, plus Coney Island, which boasted a half-dozen Italian spots as early as 1905.
A restaurant of note that opened further uptown in Manhattan, removed from the downtown Italian enclaves, was Leone’s in 1905 at 39th and Broadway. It became popular, very popular, moved a couple of times, and expanded greatly, thriving for decades, before matriarch Mamma Leone died in 1944. Its renown as Mamma Leone’s, especially with tourists to New York, lasted for decades. It became a model for the future cliché of an Italian restaurant with a garishly festive décor and gargantuan portions of the dishes that would be part of the Italian-American canon. In 1959 it was purchased by the ground-breaking and long-successful Restaurant Associates group. Later it devolved into a deserved source of derision for any somewhat serious diner. The restaurant lasted until 1994 and probably served over 20 million customers. Along the way, it also spawned a widely sold and influential cookbook from son Gene Leone in the mid-1960s that helped home cooks recreate their well-loved Italian-themed staples at home.
Continued....
Introduction
This book, rather, booklet is part of a larger book entitled, Eating Italian in America – The Story of the Country’s Favorite Food, from Red Sauce to White Truffles. More accurately, this is part of a larger book project, as Eating Italian in America is not yet finished. Its work remains at a standstill as I decide how to proceed with it.
The idea for the book came to me in the first half of 2008. The investigation into this surprisingly broad subject has been progressing in fits and starts since then. This booklet is somewhat of an excerpt of that broader project, and one that I was using to show off the work-in-progress. It was written in the summer of 2010, subsequently updated. I thought to make it available as an electronic book because I was stuck in my attempts to complete the rest of the book, and believed that it might be a good idea to have this rather self-contained portion available because it is a good read, and might be of interest to legions of fans of Italian food and dining. These restaurants have provided a tremendous amount of enjoyment across the country for well over a century, after all.
The result, this booklet, is about a third or less of what I intend to eventually cover; there is a lot more to Italian food in this country than the story of Italian-themed restaurants. But, it is an appealing tale in its own right, and one that has not yet been fully told. The amount of research done for a broader outline, with much of it contained in this relatively brief now 35,000-words-or-so edition, should be quite evident. Hopefully, not too evident, as it is meant to be a fun read, not just for those attracted to the history of food, but nearly everyone who enjoys reading something in addition to a menu.
This fairly concise tome follows the food of the Italian immigrants from port cities, Bohemian enclaves and the early cheap, table d’hôte eateries through the appearance of spaghetti and meatballs and the development of a recognizable Italian-American cooking, with which America fell in love, to the introduction of fine-dining then alta cucina, sleek trattorias, regionally inspired spots and beyond. It is an enjoyable saga, the history of Italian restaurants in America.
These establishments have been more influential than most realize. Italian restaurants have introduced foods and dishes, and codified Italian preparations for diners and home cooks. The osso buco, veal Parmesan, saltimbocca, Caesar salad, tiramisu and many others you might have prepared at home are not the result of any Italian home-cooking tradition but are dishes that first appeared in restaurants and made the transition to the home kitchen. The restaurants at the cutting-edge – the focus a fair portion of this story – have introduced dishes and products that are imitated and translated by the other establishments. It might take a decade for their creations that have struck a chord with the public to filter all the way down, maybe less in this hyper-connected world, but the famed, truly innovative restaurants usually have an influence well beyond the customers they have served. The direction of Italian food in this country has been set largely by these places.
A good portion of the action takes place in New York, specifically Manhattan. As the point of entry for most immigrating Italians, it was also was where many stopped, as the city has long had a greater number of Italians than any other metropolitan area in the country. Coupled with the fact that New York has been the nation’s leading restaurant city – save for a decade or so – since at least the first half of the 19th century when New York was Manhattan, it should not be surprising that much of the story of the Italian restaurant in America is the story of the Italian restaurant in New York. Its importance stretches well beyond the spread “New York-style pizza” to all types of Italian restaurants.
Well beyond the five boroughs, the range of types of Italian restaurants is indicative how much a part of the American landscape these are: pizza joints, sub shops, Italian delis, panini purveyors, espresso stops, Italian ice stands, gelato shops, Italian-themed wine bars, and full-service restaurants at every level of formality, ambition and price. But, one of the most interesting things about Italian restaurants in this country is that hardly any are truly Italian.
“The air was thick with the scents of garlic, onions and Parmesan. It was also loud with song – specifically, opera”
- Frank Bruni, New York Times, at Tommaso in Brooklyn in 2006
The Italian Restaurant, an American Institution
Italian restaurants have been an especially beloved fixture in America for at least a century. Featuring flying pizzas, slippery strands of spaghetti paired with plump meatballs that most have savored since childhood, tomato sauce ladled and consumed by the pint, garlickly and buttered toasted bread quick to leave a grease stain, tender slices of veal, gooey eggplant Parmesan, gregarious owners, the air filled with Sinatra and Martin or Verdi and Donizetti, a lively and comfortable dining room, generous mounds of food, copious amounts of wine….one from this cluttered group of images might be the first evoked in the average American concerning Italian food. There is much than more that, of course. Italian restaurants come in many guises these days, adapting to an ever-changing and -growing dining landscape, if seemingly always well-suited for the ever-growing waistlines. Today there are various different types that wave the banner of Italian food: sleek trattorias advertising a regional cuisine, national chains serving “Italian immigrant” fare, “Italian grilles,” long-lasting family-run favorites owned by a second- or third generation, Italian steakhouses, pizzerias, creative fine-dining temples that rival the top Michelin-starred restaurants in Italy, and even the humble hoagie shops.
In one or more of its manifestations, Italian restaurants remain a common sight across the country. Serving as an introduction to Italian food for many, these have encouraged life-long infatuations, not just for the food served in these, but for food in general. Italian restaurants have also helped to broaden the palate of countless diners. This is probably especially so for Italian-Americans, who explored beyond a familiar base. With about 30% of diners claiming Italian as their favorite cuisine, new Italian-themed eateries continuing to open from coast-to-coast, and even French and resolutely American restaurants serving pastas and risottos, this popularity shows no sign of abating, even as Americans become more sophisticated and far-ranging in their dining habits. Reflecting that, Italian restaurants are even better than ever. These are also more diffuse and diverse, and continue to evolve. Casonsei, crudo and culaletto might be more frequently used than carbonara and cannoli in the savvy diners’ lexicon, one that began decades ago with a few terms like spaghetti and spumoni.
The First Italian Restaurants in America
Spaghetti and spumoni weren’t served at the first Italian restaurants in this country. These were opened by the 1860s in the big port cities like New York, New Orleans and San Francisco. Immigration from Italy totaled roughly 70,000 in all the years prior to 1880, mostly from the northern Italian regions of Liguria, Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto and Tuscany. These newcomers were largely craftsmen, merchants and entrepreneurs and their families. The restaurants and food stores they founded existed to serve the rather small immigrant communities while providing an ongoing livelihood for their proprietors. This usually necessitated attracting non-Italians. The early restaurants served straightforward fare inspired mostly by the home-cooking of their northern homes, soups, fish, and roasts, likely buttressed by additional meats and seafood that were more available and affordable in the New World. It was not exactly what they had at home. The cooking had to be adapted to local ingredients.
The future menu staples of spaghetti and spumoni were unknown to the first restaurateurs unless they had spent time in Naples. Italy in the late 19th century was newly united and had nothing approaching a national cuisine. There were scores of cuisines that varied from town to town and region to region. From the extremes of the peninsula, the foods could be dramatically dissimilar. As great as the differences are, the foods of the many regions and cities were much closer to each other than to those of other cuisines. The foods of Genoa were much different from that of Palermo, and even nearby Turin, but these would have held a level of similarity to any other Italian fare that did not exist with the foods of Hungary, Germany, or America. Though there was not – and still is not – a national Italian cuisine, the phrase “Italian cuisine” or truer to the vernacular, “Italian food” still made sense.
The earliest restaurants and those in the ensuing decades were not conscious replications of eateries in Italy. In theme these might have reflected the simple osterie or trattorie that served the small number of travelers in Italian cities and towns. The food was dependent upon the new locale and whims and skills of the proprietor and chef. Campi's Italian and Swiss Restaurant first opened in San Francisco around 1859. It was for many years one of the burgeoning city’s best, most frequented and “cosmopolitan” restaurants. In Manhattan Moretti was a well-known establishment that began possibly as early as the 1850s by a native of Vincenza, a city west of Venice. It was known a couple of decades later for the quality and quantity of its cooking that was “always accompanied by a very fine risotto.” One of its four successively more northerly addresses chasing well-heeled patrons was near both Tammany Hall and the Academy of Music and its Italian singers. The restaurant attracted distinguished guests including the Prince of Wales in its prolonged heyday, which seemed to last into the new century. An article announcing the proprietor’s final retirement home to Italy in 1903 cited customers mourning that its “famous risotto and kidneys was beyond their reach forever.” It might seem unusual that this rice dish that became popular on menus again in the 1990s would have “famous” associated with it. Another renowned and long-lasting food establishment that also began in the 1860s was Solari’s in New Orleans. Founded by immigrants from around Genoa, it was primarily an importer and dry goods store that also served meals during the day. Described as “one of the nation’s finest grocery stores” by Clementine Paddleford in Gourmet magazine even nine decades later, Solari’s deli counter was a longtime institution for breakfast and lunch for those residing or working in the French Quarter and nearby Central Business District.
“The foremost of the Italian table d'hôte restaurants was Martinelli,” a rival to Morretti at the top of the Italian heap in Manhattan during the 1880s. Martinelli was a frequent host to banquets for alumni groups, military fraternities, and political organizations with prominent guest lists that were regularly reported in the local papers. The table d’hôte referred to a fixed multi-course meal that might have changed daily, or at least regularly. It was a popular option in most restaurants at the time. In 1885 the New York Times described this segment of the dining landscape in Manhattan:
“there are….about 25 places where foreign cookery, mainly Italian, is dispensed at figures ranging from 30 cents per caput - without wine - to $1.25 with wine. In the most inexpensive establishments dinner is served at 6, and the habitués sit at a long table being expected to assemble toward the same hour. This….is the real table d’hôte system, but it only prevails where the dinners are cheapest….The 30-cent dinner habitually includes soup, fish, an entrée, a roast, and a cup of coffee, macaroni occasionally substituted for the meat entrée. The dishes are invariably highly flavored…tough or unsavory viands, however, are unknown.”
The wine served was often familiar names, if tasting a little differently than today, “Chianti … Barbera…Barolo” that the owner himself had imported, a profitable side business. Later, as the northern Californian wine industry got up to speed (with considerable help from Italian immigrants), the wine would more likely be from the west coast, certainly for the set-price meal. Reported in the New York Sun in 1905 about the typical Italian restaurant on New York’s immigrant lower west side that, “the wine, indeed, is mainly from California…often served with seltzer and red.” This preference for light sparkling wine continued for a while. An article several years later recounted the wines typically served, half some sort of “spumante.”
In California, a 25¢ table d’hôte at Coppa’s in San Francisco before the earthquake in 1906 consisted of salad, pasta, entrée, sourdough bread, black coffee, and a bottle of wine. Especially at Coppa’s, meals and prices like that made it popular with patrons well beyond those who had recently sailed from Italy.
Some restaurants complemented the table d’hôte meal with a menu, à la carte service. Fior d’Italia, about the fanciest of the ten or so restaurants in the Italian section of San Francisco, offered mostly choices from a menu. Founded in 1886 by a native of Liguria, within a decade he had partnered with other paesani and a Tuscan providing the resources of several families that helped to sustain its success, which lasted for many decades. On its 30th anniversary, the restaurant boasted of having served an astounding 15 million meals, which averages to 1,400 per day. It sat 750 people at the time. Fior d’Italia is still open today, the nation’s longest-operating Italian restaurant. Items from a concise menu from its inaugural year, written in English, were risotto with clams, tortellini Bologna, veal cutlets, veal scaloppini, veal sauté, chicken sauté (25¢ versus 5¢ for the veal version), broiled chicken, fritto misto, tenderloin steak, porterhouse for two, calf’s brains, calf’s liver, and the two most expensive individual items at 40¢, squab casserole and frog’s legs, plus the “Special Dinner with Wine” for 35¢.
By the turn of the 20th century, both New York and San Francisco had a number of thriving Italian restaurants. New York was unique in the country. It was both the point of entry for nearly all arriving Italians, almost 97%, and where a significant percentage found a paycheck and a home. New York had the greatest concentration of Italians, and, by far, the largest number of restaurants. Italian restaurants became even more common sights in the first quarter of the 20th century, especially in Manhattan, as the flood of immigrants from Italy provided masses of potential customers. Of the nation’s 2.1 million Italians recorded in the 1910 census, both foreign and native born, over a quarter resided in New York City, more than 540,000. There were tens of thousands just across the river in northern New Jersey, too. It was natural that New York, specifically its commercial center, Manhattan, is where the Italian restaurant did most of its development from its earliest days through today.
The Italian Restaurant Evolves as Immigration Increases
“The cheapness of the Italian restaurants is one of the features of their present renaissance…The average price of an Italian table d’hôte dinner to-day is half as much [as in the 1880s],” reported the New York Sun in late 1908 in a piece entitled “The March of the Italian Chef.” Five years later, the New York Times quoted a frequent customer as saying, “One can go into any one of them and obtain a delightful meal for from 30 and 60 cents.” Though that did not include wine, it was to be had for “very little, from 50 to 60 cents a quart.” So, for between $7 and $15 in 2011 dollars, diners could enjoy a meal featuring several courses, and could add plentiful wine for just another $6 to $7. Most Italian restaurants remained inexpensive, even less expensive on average than a quarter century before.
Helping to keep prices low at these restaurants, among other things, was the pace and nature of immigration from Italy. It ramped up considerably, from 12,000 a year in 1880 to 52,000 in 1890 to 100,000 in 1900, and reaching a peak of 285,000 in 1907. These were all potential new customers, and in these numbers were many new restaurant owners, too. The new immigrants were largely unattached men, both single and those who had left families back in Italy, who came with plans to make money for a homestead and return to Italy rather than settle. Over 80% of immigrants from Italy were men, with a big portion officially immigrating more than once. This was fairly unique among the European immigrants. Nearly all of the Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, Slavs and Jews who traveled from their native lands knew they were leaving for good. But, without a wife and family by their side, these Italian men needed to be fed outside of home. Many of the newest Italian restaurants, both in New York and more so elsewhere, were really just dining rooms in boarding houses serving men without families who labored during the day. A large number were the cheap table d’hôte establishments described above. Though all immigrants preferred the familiar foods of their homelands, the preference of the Italians notably exceeded that of nearly every other group. The Kasruth-adhering Ashkenazi Jews might have been the exception. A New York paper noted in 1903, “No people are more devoted to their native foods than the Italians.” And, there was the sufficient critical mass in most immigrant areas for them to expect Italian food to be cooked for them somewhere nearby.
The multitudes of working-class customers provided demand for thousands of low-priced Italian eateries across the country. Nearly all of these restaurants had to be inexpensive, as its core customer base was laborers. A deep recession caused by the Panic of 1907 lasting until 1910 helped keep a lid on prices even as immigration from Italy dropped by nearly half for a couple of years. This economic distress might have made cheap restaurants even cheaper as the Sun and Times pieces above note. Another very important factor keeping these eminently affordable was that the general dining public was just not ready for pricey Italian restaurants. The Sun wrote in that late 1908 article, quoting an Italian restaurant owner, “Americans who are willing to pay large sums do not want exclusively Italian dishes. They insist upon having so many French and American things.” Italian restaurants were not considered fine dining, even when Moretti was one of the very best Italians some years earlier. “There was little or no attention paid to service and the incidental features of the meal were not attractive,” remembered a manager of a leading restaurant in that piece. This contrasted sharply with the leading French restaurants, which were run by those who had trained to be in the restaurant business, as had their chefs. “Later he [Moretti] moved uptown, and met with failure there,” since the wealthier, non-Italian demographic he was chasing would not pay his prices, which were as much as $1.25 for a full meal with wine. “The Italian dinner had distinctly passed out of the dollar class [by the early 1900s in New York]…That is paid nowadays for the French table d’ hôte, but not for the Italian, which must be considered as standing on a cheaper basis.” This belief lasted in the minds of most diners until today in some markets. Italian restaurants had long been inexpensive, and never as polished as the top restaurants.
Affordability was just one part of the appeal, though. “It is the excellent taste of the food in addition to its price,” continued the 1908 article in Sun. Cheapness coupled with exuberant and easily enjoyable flavor had already become a hallmark, at least in New York. To these attractions was another one that contrasted with brusqueness of the male-dominated oyster parlors and chop houses, the polished, professional service of the French and hotel restaurants, and the concern for providing simply basic functionality elsewhere. This was spelled out in a tome about Chicago’s dining landscape some years later, and meaningful throughout the country, “the atmosphere is typically Italian - which, in other words, means hospitable.”
That fixed menu table d’hôte concept, long popular for most restaurants, continued to make it easier for non-Italian customers to order, analogous to the present-day lunch buffet at Indian restaurants across the country. The Sun article continued:
“What the Italian restaurant does is put the dishes that appeal to New York tastes on the bill of fare of the table d’hôte. That suffices to please those who want something of the ordinary kind of food with a liberal allowance of what is peculiarly Italian… while the uncompromising Italians are able to get what they want by ordering it…’In that way all my patrons will be pleased,’” according to an Italian restaurateur.
In these more mixed areas, restaurants catered to both Italian and non-Italians, alike. Many restaurants served solely Italian patrons. “In those downtown neighborhoods that assure them a distinctively Italian patronage the table d’hôte is unknown… [they] offer a list of dishes not changed by the least intrusion of American ideas.”
Reflecting the diet of their homeland, especially for the multitudes of southern Italians, but odd for restaurants in America at the time, vegetables held a special place in the Italian restaurants. “You find no better vegetables anywhere than are served in reputable but cheap Italian restaurants… tomatoes, eggplant and peppers are especially good. They also do Lyonnaise potatoes admirably,” and “salads are almost always good,” reported the New York Sun in a piece geared toward the city’s adventurous diner in 1909, “The Italian Cook's Best - Dishes to Choose When You Eat His Fare.” In what was later to be the calling card of these eateries and a big ingredient in the success, the “Italian cook…can beat anybody in the world in making tomatoes richly palatable.”
The products of the garden might not have fully interested the non-Italian, and in a typical restaurant for the “meat entrée you have a pretty wide choice of kidneys, liver, veal in many forms, tripe and nondescript stews.” An article the previous year counseled that “the knowing person who goes to an Italian restaurant would never think of ordering beef or chicken.” The costs of excellent beef and chicken then were too much for these inexpensive restaurants, which could only afford inferior quality for the very low meal prices they were charging. “Italian steaks are cheap, but apt to be tough,” reflecting both the aversion to the necessary expense for quality and the Italian-bred cooks and patrons’ initial unfamiliarity or indifference with it. “Veal, lamb, and good giblets, on the other hand, are much cheaper,” and were much more apt to be served in an appropriately savory fashion. These became menu staples for decades. Veal, especially, is where these early 20th century Italian restaurants shined. In its various forms “the veal will be better than any they can find elsewhere in New York,” something that likely continues.
The owners of these restaurants might have still largely been those first immigrants who were from the northern Italy in New York, but four-fifths of the newer arrivals were from the regions south of Rome and Sicily. What they ate at these restaurants was usually recognizable from home. Much of it was foods that were less affordable and less available before emigrating: pasta, meat and fish. Some of the fare usually included “minestrone,” “fried flounder,” “ossa boco [sic],” and “veal cutlet…à la Milanaise with cepes.” There was also “spaghetti and macaroni…served with a meat sauce…or with cheese or tomatoes” that were common items at these restaurants by 1908. Those from the south and Sicily were not familiar with the osso buco or vitello alla Milanese that graced many bills-of-fare, and most could not afford it on a regular basis, anyway. They knew the inexpensive pasta, though. As had the majority of the customers, restaurant offerings were going to change.
Italian Restaurants in Bohemia
Interestingly, Italian restaurants found new non-Italian patrons in the sections of several large cities that were homes to a critical mass of creative types beginning in the late 19th century. This was most notable in New York’s Greenwich Village. “The Italian restaurants of Bohemia numbered in the dozens…. All of them served virtually identical food. They were located in private houses, with a dining room and small bar on the ground floor and a kitchen in the back, where the owner's wife did the cooking,” from Appetite City, a history of dining in New York. This was odd, on its face, given the fact that most Italian immigrants and restaurateurs were uneducated, sometimes even illiterate, and quite conservative befitting their peasant backgrounds from isolated small towns and villages, some of the most backward places in Europe. These were lands far removed from the outlooks and lifestyles of the artistic communities of the country’s largest cities.
The artist- and bohemian-heavy Greenwich Village was also home to many Italians and adjacent to Little Italy. This proximity was necessitated by the fact that both the artists and immigrant Italians were dependent upon low rents. The attraction for a starving artist of these nearby eateries was easily understood: “a spaghetti dinner was cheap, filling, and redolent of good flavors not to be found elsewhere,” as described in a lively gastronomic history of this country, American Food. Inexpensive and plentiful wine also helped, and likely the fact that many Italians themselves were musicians, singers and artisans. The Latin Quarter in San Francisco, later known as North Beach, was another famous spot for bohemian diners that lasted at least through the end of the era of the Beats in the 1960s. In Chicago “Tower Town [from the nearby landmark Water Tower], the Greenwich Village or the Latin Quarter, lies across the river on the near north side” was home to several popular Italian restaurants since the 1880s according to a Chicago restaurant guide published in 1931. Not just in the largest cities was the mutual affinity of the artistic community and Italian restaurants to be found. Ciro & Sal’s in Provincetown, Massachusetts at the tip of Cape Cod that opened in the mid-1950s was long a popular spot for vacationing literary lights and artists of nearly every stripe including Eugene O’Neill, Norman Mailer, Claes Oldenburg, Marc Rothko and Andy Warhol.
The 1920s Brings Restrictions on Wine and Italians
The 1920s brought two changes that greatly affected the Italian restaurants: laws that greatly slowed immigration from Italy and Prohibition. Xenophobia against many of the newcomers was even reflected in scholarly quarters. Edward Alsworth Ross, Professor of Sociology at the ostensibly progressive University of Wisconsin – and a founder of American sociology and President of the American Sociological Society in 1914-1915 – wrote in a trade book about immigration in 1914 that unless the flood of “gross little aliens” from “the backward and benighted provinces from Naples to Sicily” was sharply diminished, America, “must in the end resign itself to lower efficiency, to less democracy, or to both.” This sentiment was held widely enough for two pieces of legislation restricting the tide of immigration from Italy. The Quota Act of 1921 limited its immigration to 3% annually of their population in the 1910 census. The Johnson-Reed Act in 1924 further reduced the new arrivals from southern and eastern Europe to 2% of the 1890 census. Immigration from Italy had slowed to a trickle when the Great War reached it furious conclusion as Germany exhausted itself and the even deadlier influenza epidemic beginning in 1918 infected a fifth of the world's population and killed around 50 million people. The pace of newcomers from Italy increased in 1920 and reached a last peak of 220,000 in 1921 before declining to around 50,000 per annum for a few years before the quotas took full effect. There were just 6,000 immigrants from Italy in 1925. The number averaged 15,000 for several years afterwards, a far cry from before.
With fewer immigrants, many of the boarding houses that had catered to them opened restaurants or transformed into restaurants to survive. And, many restaurants began to more actively seek non-Italian customers. Most meaningful, though, was that the lifeline to Italy was almost completely severed. The Depression and war continued to limit the number of new Italians, and, so, current Italian trends. The Italian restaurants in America had to develop independently of Italy, almost necessarily. There was not much in the way of Italian restaurant models to follow, anyway. The best and most current Italian cooking during that time was done in the aristocratic households, and experience and knowledge of it was rather limited. The top restaurants in Italy were in the grand hotels in the biggest cities and in the spa and resort towns that catered to an international group. These did not serve much in the way of Italian food, it was French, and these even conducted business largely in French.
Italian restaurants in the 1920s in this country had to do without Italian wines, and also domestic wines, for that matter, at least officially. The temperance movement had been around for decades, the product of well-meaning if hopelessly misdirected Protestant moralists, led by the Methodist church. It gained greater momentum during the First World War as anti-German sentiment grew (twenty-plus states enacted laws against using German in public meetings or school), and was directed against the country’s brewing industry, which was entirely Germanic. A distinct lack of coordination and effort among the various organizations comprised of those businesses making, distributing and selling alcoholic beverages made for a surprisingly ineffective opposition. Racist sentiment in the South (which included the widely brandished image of black men fueled by gin posing a threat to white womanhood), anti-Jewish feelings, as Jewish merchants handled much of the liquor trade there, and anti-immigrant feelings were also significant aspects of the late anti-alcohol movement. These and other factors led to the passing of the laws that resulted in Prohibition. This went into effect nationwide in January, 1920. With it, the making, selling and transportation of alcoholic beverages was prohibited. For most Italian restaurateurs, this was potentially calamitous. Wine was a nearly necessary accompaniment to an Italian meal, certainly so for the immigrants. It was so ingrained that it was common for Italians to begin drinking wine, in diluted fashion, as children.
Most Italians still drank wine. There was a provision in the Prohibition prohibitions that allowed for up to 200 gallons of wine to be made at home. Prohibition was certainly an incentive for even more American Italians to make wine, if they were not doing so already. “In 1917, when wine was legal, Americans consumed 70 million gallons – imported, domestic, and homemade. By 1925 Americans were drinking 150 million gallons of just the homemade stuff,” reported in Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Bootleggers and restaurants provided a ready – if not legal – market for those homemade wines. The supply existed, as 200 gallons was far more than a typical household would need, in almost any case.
Most Italian restaurants continued to provide wine, though usually surreptitiously. Like many other places, San Francisco’s Fior d’Italia poured it in coffee cups to deflect attention, which worked for a while. But constant harassment from authorities caused it to eventually cease serving wine. With decreased business the restaurant moved in 1929 to smaller quarters that were able to accommodate about a quarter the number of diners than before, about 200. Though Prohibition made normal operations more difficult for Italian eateries, it killed nearly all of the fine-dining restaurants in the country. The better restaurants had always relied on selling wine and liquor to be profitable. And, people wanted to drink during the 1920s as they always had. So, they often visited the speakeasies rather than those high-end restaurants that did not serve alcohol. More so, “restaurants that stayed dry were doomed not just because of public tastes, but also by labor economics: because tips in speakeasies were so much larger, so was the earning power of their waiters and chefs; this attracted the best in the business,” according to Last Call. The demise of top restaurants spelled the end of any culture of fine dining and a certain level of appreciation of food in general throughout America, a dearth that lasted at least a generation. The ensuing Depression and Second World War prolonged its absence.
Though an almost requisite part of the Italian meal was officially prohibited, Prohibition might have been beneficial for many Italian restaurants. According to Mary Grozvenor Ellsworth in the book Much Depends on Dinner not long after the fact in 1939, “Prohibition…had a great deal to do with the introduction of Italian food to the masses… The Italians who opened up speakeasies by the thousand were our main recourse in time of trial. Whole hordes of Americans thus got exposed regularly and often to Italian food....” Its affordability and quality, especially compared to that offered at other nightspots with their “lackluster speakeasy cuisine,” were big factors. And, not incidentally, even for the non-speakeasies, while wine was officially banned, it certainly was not banished from most Italian eateries. Nearly all had much lower profiles than the famed Fior. The Chicago dining guide from 1931 even gives a primer on wine early in the book. The most prevalent variety at the Italian restaurants then, though, was, “Dago Red…a very cheap concoction parading under the name of wine.” This Dago Red had been a thriving “brand name” for at least a couple of decades by then (and proved to be more enduring than “Chateau la Feet” that had gained some traction in the Bay Area). Poorly made wine – often by immigrant laborers and tradesmen operating in basements and tenements – coarsely named, was a greater attraction than no wine at all.
Prohibition and the new immigration policies had slowed, but did not stop the inexorable growth in the number of Italian restaurants. By the end of the first decade of 20th century, the Italian establishments in Manhattan had begun to move uptown from the downtown neighborhoods of Little Italy and Greenwich Village. More opened up in neighborhoods where Italians moved in great numbers; East Harlem in Manhattan, which became the largest Italian-American enclave in the country, Belmont in the Bronx and Bensonhurst, Williamsburg and Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn, plus Coney Island, which boasted a half-dozen Italian spots as early as 1905.
A restaurant of note that opened further uptown in Manhattan, removed from the downtown Italian enclaves, was Leone’s in 1905 at 39th and Broadway. It became popular, very popular, moved a couple of times, and expanded greatly, thriving for decades, before matriarch Mamma Leone died in 1944. Its renown as Mamma Leone’s, especially with tourists to New York, lasted for decades. It became a model for the future cliché of an Italian restaurant with a garishly festive décor and gargantuan portions of the dishes that would be part of the Italian-American canon. In 1959 it was purchased by the ground-breaking and long-successful Restaurant Associates group. Later it devolved into a deserved source of derision for any somewhat serious diner. The restaurant lasted until 1994 and probably served over 20 million customers. Along the way, it also spawned a widely sold and influential cookbook from son Gene Leone in the mid-1960s that helped home cooks recreate their well-loved Italian-themed staples at home.
Continued....
