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Little Italy: not much Italy, not much flavor
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Spaghetti carbonara at Casa Bella on Mulberry Street
So why, you ask, would the Global Gourmet Examiner want to visit Manhattan's Little Italy? Certainly not for the food, which is standard "export Italian" at best, substandard tourist glop at worst. Nor for the architecture, which is Lower East Side tenement enhanced by 21st century graffiti. A block away from the teeming markets of Chinatown; Little Italy seems like an urban planner's afterthought rather than a quaint, if dingy, holdover from a simpler time.
Two lanes of parking, a single lane for moving vehicles along narrow Mulberry Street, but there are no pushcart peddlars; only restaurants, cafés, and souvenir shops Very few identifiable local residents from the four-story tenements lining the narrow street. Instead, you go for the show, for the families from Omaha, guidebooks in hand; for the over-the-top barkers outside every establishment. “Come back and look for me, da guy wid da long nose,” says one. "Best food on the street," they all say. "Homemade pasta." (Homemade by Chef Boyardee, maybe.).
Almost nobody in Little taly makes a big deal over their pizza these days; pizza's been coopted by the quick-serve and home-delivery people. (And don't tell me you can "make your own pizza at home." Not without a 600-degree, wood-burning oven, you can't. What you're making is soggy toast.)
Back to the original question: if you're such a spoilsport, what was your correspondent doing in Little Italy, aside from feeling obnoxoiusly smug? Meeting with family, we'll have you know, to celebrate success in the halls of academe and the thickets of romance. So it mattered little in which joint we sat, mattered not a whit that the supposedly Italian waiter pronounced it "broo-shetta" instead of "bruce-ketta," mattered not that the caprese's mozzarella was made of plastic or that the carbonara was far too creamy. The over-dry tiramisu, on the other hand, was anything but mouthwatering. To reveal that the restaurant's initials were CB does no one any favors; it could have been any of a dozen. Caprese, Carbonara, Tiramisu: Three Strikes & You're Out!
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