As part of book project about Italian food in this country, I have been looking at a lot of Italian restaurant menus, too many menus. So, I thought that it would be interesting to put together a list of the items – the dishes, preparations or products – that are found most frequently at Italian restaurants across the country.
From over 300 current and recent menus from full-service Italian-themed restaurants in thirty-five states at nearly every level of ambition and price range, I have a representative list. It might not feature a statistically significant sample, but it is likely somewhat close.
On over 40% of menus, the tenth most popular menu item is risotto. Cooked slowly with short grain rice, risotto is a staple of the northern Italians regions of Veneto, Lombardy and parts of Piedmont. It is the traditional first course, primo piatto, of these regions just as the dried pasta dishes are in southern Italy, and the fresh pastas are in Emilia-Romgana. Rice grows well in the Po Valley in those northern regions. In fact, the province of Vercelli in eastern Piedmont is the European capital of rice.
Risotto really began to gain traction in this country in the 1980s with more ambitious and authentically Italian places like Rex, Valentino and Primi in southern California. Because of these influential restaurants, risotto was seemingly found more frequently there than elsewhere. In New York top spots like Palio, Lusardi’s and San Domenico served it, along with the Piedmont-inclined Barbetta, which had been serving it for many years.
In fact, risotto has probably been found on restaurant menus continuously – if limited nearly to New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles – since the 1880s, if not earlier. In the 1880s, two-decade old Moretti in Manhattan was known for its “very fine risotto.” An article in 1903 announcing the proprietor’s retirement home to Vicenza in the Veneto cited customers bereaved because Moretti’s “famous risotto and kidneys was beyond their reach forever.” Risotto was on the opening menu of San Francisco’s Fior d’Italia in 1886. Risotto is still on their menu today.
With the much greater ease in procuring top-notch Italian short grain rice – and the wider-scale availability of quality domestic alternatives – it is much easier for restaurants to feature risotto. Plus, as recipes and food knowledge have disseminated widely, risotto is well understood by most restaurant customers, many of whom probably make it at home. On menus today, risotto can be a replication of an Italian dish, something featuring local ingredients, a first course, or, more so, an entrée, and even a side dish.
Risotto has almost an American staple, at least on Italian restaurants here.
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