The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City

Chapter 6: Serving Ethnicity

6 serving ethnicity Italian Restaurants, American Eaters, and the Making of an Ethnic Popular Culture remaking ethnicity at the red-Checkered Table: restaurants and Italian American Identity One hot July evening in 1940, two men dined at Moneta’s, at 32 Mulberry Street in the heart of what was by then known as Little Italy.1 The men were Federal Writers’ Project researchers working on a food guide to New York titled Feeding the City, and they had a lovely experience. The food was excellent, and the simple but fascinating atmosphere attracted a cheerful clientele. As they later wrote about the dinner, Moneta’s was “an effective stage for the rendezvous of brilliant judges, lawyers, writers, celebrities and beautiful women.”2 The popularity of Moneta’s was not a passing fad. Ten years earlier, the columnist and screenwriter Rian James had similarly described Moneta’s as “a haven for gourmets and epicures, for ladies and gentlemen who dine with leisure,” its tables hosting the famous and the powerful.3 Moneta’s was just one of hundreds of Italian restaurants spread all over New York. In 1938, there were 600 self-described Italian eateries in Manhattan, 300 in Brooklyn, and 250 in the Bronx.4 By that time, Italian restaurants had become a ubiquitous presence—public places where non-Italian New Yorkers, travelers, and tourists could feel like they were experiencing Italian culture. Decades before the ethnic food boom, going to Italian restaurants was an exciting adventure that appealed across the lines of gender, class, and ethnicity. Did the popularity of Italian restaurants reflect a broader attraction among non-Italians to Italian Americans and Italian American life? It did not. In 1930, the same year in which James extolled the refinement of New York’s Italian restaurants , President Herbert Hoover responded to a criticism from Manhattan 6. serving ethnicity · 181 congressman Fiorello La Guardia by telling him, “You should go back to where you belong and advise Mussolini on how to make good honest citizens in Italy. The Italians are predominantly our murderers and bootleggers. . . . Like a lot of other foreign spawn, you do not appreciate the country which supports and tolerates you.”5 In the interwar years, the position of Italian Americans in the larger life of the city was still far from secure and subject to a complicated range of attitudes. Some of these attitudes, such as the one represented in Hoover’s public attack, linked the group to social and cultural backwardness and a natural inclination to crime. The exclusionary Immigration Act of 1924 was filled with fearful allusions to the racial inadequacy of Italian immigrants and their inability to make good American citizens. At the same time, however, Italian immigrant restaurateurs and restaurant workers were beginning to transform cultural differences into highly marketable products for mass consumption. In the dynamic urban popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s, Italian restaurateurs played an important role in shaping Italian American identities. In designing and presenting their restaurants, they drew selectively on southern Italian rural immigrant culture, aspects of Italian national culture (from opera to landscape painting), and even American popular culture, notably film. Skillfully juxtaposing elements from different cultural contexts, restaurateurs were able to articulate an original and ultimately appealing ethnic narrative. In the theatrical spaces of New York’s Italian restaurants, Italian Americans were seen no longer as undercivilized immigrants or dangerous criminals but as a family-centered, artistically inclined, and emotionally exuberant people. The cuisine, often codified in easily recognizable preparations and menus, embodied these cultural values and helped create a new Italian imaginary—one that signified not crime or poverty but abundance, artistry, and tradition. The success of Italian restaurants also depended on their ability to provide a safe, comfortable space where non-Italian middle-class Americans could enjoy Italian customs and culture, to share in the experience of “being Italian,” or Italianit à. In staging a kind of distorted mirror play, crafty Italian Americans in the restaurant business capitalized on Anglo-Protestant middle-class fantasies about Italians as a racially “in-between” people. These ethnic entrepreneurs managed to overturn stereotypes about themselves using equally racialized stereotypes of their Anglo-Protestant clientele. Through cuisine and conviviality, they served their customers the ideal of Italy as a pleasurable escape from another ideal: the Victorian model of middle-class respectability and restraint. Italian restaurants responded to and fulfilled middle-class expectations for pleasure and “safe danger.” In the process, these restaurants provided the Italian American community with a highly...