New Orleans is home to both a terrific restaurant scene and a number of folks whose last names end in a vowel; (though a fair percentage has migrated to the suburbs). Given that, there are a surprisingly small number of Italian-themed restaurants in New Orleans. I used to dine at an egregiously mediocre one on Jackson Square seemingly every visit, for some reason. My last trip included a very enjoyable meal at the Italian-American Eleven 79, which reminded me a lot of restaurants in other cities, but seemed relatively unique for New Orleans.
This is adapted from From the Antipasto to the Zabaglione – The Story of Italian Restaurants, which makes for a terrific Christmas gift, by the way.
New Orleans is an odd case among the cities that drew a large number of immigrants from Italy. As a leading port, New Orleans was an important entry for Sicilian citrus products in the 19th century, which eventually led to immigration from Sicily, beginning in earnest in the 1880s. By the turn of the century there were over 12,000 Sicilians in New Orleans, accounting for nearly all of the Italians there. Clustered near the port, the French Quarter was 80% Sicilian in the early 20th century and referred to as “Little Palermo.”
These immigrants adapted quickly to the already omnipresent Creole cuisine, which was strongly classic French in character. This rich and deliberate cooking, much different than anything else in America, was an easy one for any newcomer to enjoy, especially so when it included some of the excellent and abundant bounty from the nearby Gulf of Mexico: oysters, shrimp, red snapper, pompano, trout and flounder. Immigrant restaurants were quick to acclimate. For example, “in the 1920s Turici’s Italian Gardens served many pasta dishes but it also offered pâté de foie gras and many other dishes à la Creole,” noted a culinary history of New Orleans. Casamento’s, Liuzza’s, Mandina’s, and Pascal’s Manale were restaurants opened by Sicilians and still run by their descendents that have remained popular for decades. One would be hard-pressed to find anything Sicilian on their menus, which are filled almost entirely with the New Orleans Creole fare. And, just a few Italian-American staples like spaghetti and meatballs, fried calamari and lasagna can be found. Usually joining these dishes is a New Orleans-inflected version of the simple Neapolitan classic spaghetti aglio e olio, spaghetti and bordelaise, in which butter is added to the garlic and olive oil. Well-loved Mosca’s, not far from the city, does not have Sicilian roots, but is also much more New Orleans than Italy in the kitchen.
Tortorici’s, a much more Italian establishment in the heart of the Quarter opened in 1900 and lasted over a century, was one significant exception. There were, and are, other Italian restaurants, Moran’s La Louisiane and later Tony Moran’s (family name Brocato), for example, but not the number to be expected. Unlike other cities that had a large Italian population which continued to develop Italian-American cooking in their restaurants, those of New Orleans were subsumed by a dominant local cuisine. Other than a few pasta dishes and other Italian-American favorites like fried calamari, the Sicilians much more so contributed to the enhancement of the entrenched Creole cooking rather than adding a new strand. Indicative of this was a retrospective of the city’s rich culinary heritage in 2007 put on by The Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum dedicated to the history of the city, in which Italian restaurants are nearly entirely absent.
Comments