Ten things you probably don't know about Italian restaurants

Ten things you probably don’t know about Italian restaurants and Italian food in this country:

1. Two items found in almost every stylish restaurant were named after Venetian painters.
2. Lombardi’s in Manhattan is widely credited as being the first pizzeria in the country when it opened in 1905.  There was at least another pizzeria in its neighborhood by the summer of that year.
3. The five most influential people in making Italian restaurants in America more Italian during the 1980s and 1990s were not chefs.
4. Risotto was a fairly popular dish in the 1880s, at least in some quarters of Manhattan and San Francisco.
5. “Spaghetti” first appeared in print in 1880 in New York.
6. Chicken dishes could be five times as expensive as similar veal preparations in the early days of Italian restaurants.
7. The most popular dish, by a wide margin, on Italian menus today and historically is not Italian.
8. One of the great Italian sandwiches in America has Albanian roots.
9. The real Chef Boyardee was once the head chef at one of New York’s most famous and oldest Italian restaurants.
10. One city, from which very few immigrants came, has provided the dishes or the inspiration for nearly half of the traditional Italian menu items in this country.

These are just a very few of the fun facts to be found in the enjoyable new electronic book with the rather self-explanatory subtitle: From the Antipasto to the Zabaglione – The Story of Italian Restaurants in America that I have just released.  It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble's websites.

This is part of a larger project, but, it is an appealing tale in its own right, and one that has not yet been fully told. The fairly concise tome (about 140 pages if published as a standard size book) 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.  Much of what we know of Italian food has actually been introduced or codified in restaurants. 

It is a very pleasurable saga.  And, it is just $5.99 and it can be read on your PC and Mac.