A Positive and Taste Tempting Look at "Arthur Avenue" in NYC.
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THE REAL LITTLE ITALY
Speaks With The Accent of the Bronx
By John Mariani
Delta "SKY" Magazine
August 2002
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If you’ve been to Little Italy in Manhattan and were disappointed by the touristy atmosphere of the place—the T-shirts, the mostly forgettable food—it’s because you went to the wrong one. The real Little Italy—a vibrant neighborhood where Italian-Americans still live, work, shop, eat and drink—is up in the Bronx in what is called the Belmont Section of Fordham.
Others just call it Arthur Avenue, because that is the neighborhood’s main street, bisected by East 187th Street and lined with restaurants, pizzerias, cafes, groceries, meat markets, fish markets, pastry stores, and shops selling Venetian glass, espresso pots and generously sized pasta platters. It is one of the cleanest and safest sections of New York, with mothers and aunts and uncles and grandparents and sisters and brothers hanging out of the third- and fourth-story windows watching out for each other’s kids, calling across the street to remind those same children not to forget to bring home the cannoli, and endlessly playing recordings of Andrea Bocelli and Luciano Pavarotti.
This is the Bronx the way it was in the 1950s, a time when figures like Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, Yogi Berra, Eddie Arcaro, Rocky Marciano, Rocky Graziano, Jake La Motta and Julius LaRosa ate in the restaurants here. A time when guys like Toscanini, Sinatra, Martin, Como and Bennett were princes, none more so than a skinny local kid named Dion DiMucci, who called his doo-wop group the Belmonts, after the neighborhood.
The streets around Arthur Avenue still ring with the sounds of store owners singing “Maria Mari”—“Oje Mari . . . Quanta suonno ca perdo pe’ te” (“I have lost so much sleep over you”)—while they slice prosciutto. The air smells like garlic and tomato, fresh basil, coffee, and breads baking in the ovens of Addeo & Sons Bakery and Madonia Brothers Bakery. Yankees pennants festoon the storefronts, and men sit on folding chairs at their social clubs to watch the soccer matches from Italy, sip bittersweet liqueurs and read the sports pages of Oggi.
I grew up not far from Arthur Avenue, and I still shop there every week. Soon the plump brown chestnuts will be displayed in bins, and the stone crab claws and bay scallops will be glistening on ice in their stalls at Cosenza’s Fish Market and the just-weaned pigs will be in the glass case at Biancardi’s Meats. There is always a beautiful new array of dishware at Nick’s Variety Place, and summer’s the season for Italian ices—lemon, chocolate, strawberry, scooped and patted into little pleated paper cups—at De Lillo Pastry Shop.
In the vast enclosed Arthur Avenue Retail Market, David Greco at Mike’s Deli is cutting off morsels of a new imported cheese or mortadella and giving everyone a taste; the butcher who specializes in offal has beautiful, snow-white tripe today; and across the hall at the Mount Carmel Gourmet Food Shop, Jessica Navarra is putting together a gift basket of Abruzzese pasta, Tuscan olive oil and grissini (breadsticks), with a box of hazelnut-studded torrone nougat for good measure. She has 20 different olive oils, a dozen different olives, scores of pastas, chickpea flour, marinated cheeses, sprigs of fresh oregano, salted sardines, bottles of truffle oil, hot peppers and hard candies in colored wrappers.
Up the street at Calandra’s Cheese, a woman is specifying that she wants that morning’s mozzarella, so fresh and creamy that the whey will ooze out onto the paper it’s wrapped in, and around the corner on 187th Street, at De Lillo Pastry Shop, a boy is buying his grandmother a dozen anise-scented biscotti, carefully stacked in a white box and tied with string. Mount Carmel Wine & Spirits has a new shipment of elegant, well-priced Barolos from the Piedmont region, and at Borgatti’s Ravioli and Egg Noodles they’ve just made a fresh batch of cheese ravioli, which will sell out in an hour, along with sheets of egg-yellow pasta cut into the requested width of spaghetti, fettuccine or angel’s hair.
Across the street at the Mt. Carmel Candy Store you can still get a true New York egg cream—a masterfully rendered concoction made with U-bets Chocolate Syrup, ice-cold milk and seltzer, no egg, no cream. Down a couple of blocks at Terranova Bakery they’re pulling the last loaves of the day from the coal-fired oven, as much a historical artifact as it is a symbol of the neighborhood’s refusal to change.
Then there are the pizzerias and restaurants, from one end of Arthur Avenue to the other—which is only five or six blocks. On the corner of 187th Street, Full Moon Pizzeria is always packed, and there’s a news photo in the window at Giovanni’s Brick Oven Pizza of President Bush himself trying to eat a slice with pepperoni while campaigning in 1999 for the Bronx vote. But the best pizza is served at Mario’s Restaurant, which opened in 1919 and is now a fifth-generation establishment with superb linguine with clams; perfectly grilled langoustinos; tender, light potato gnocchi in a bright tomato sauce; and tiny pink lamb chops you pick up by the bone to eat—called scottaditti, which means “finger burners.” The pizza here is nonpareil, based on a thin crust that bubbles and puckers and chars as it is carefully moved around the pockets of hot air in the fearsome oven. The simplest of toppings—mozzarella, tomato and basil—meld together into Neapolitan bliss, and with a bottle of good Chianti like Remole, this becomes a meal you eat either in reverential silence or with exultant cries of “perfection!”
Most of the Italian restaurants of the neighborhood serve more or less the same menu; each turns out a better version of one dish than another, which you learn through repeated visits. At Ann & Tony’s, here since 1927, the spaghetti alla carbonara, with eggs and pancetta bacon, is lustrous, rich and creamy without cream, and the spaghetti nicely tender.
Dominick’s Bar and Restaurant is something of a special case on the street, for long ago a restaurant critic from The New York Times pronounced this no-frills, communal table eatery “one of the last of those unvarnished pasta houses that serve an honest bowl of spaghetti with fresh sauce, rough red wine and superb housemade bread,” which is like calling a modest Chinese restaurant “a good chop suey parlor.” Dominick’s is a good deal more—you get a mass of linguine with anchovies, platters of pork chops with peppers, good stuffed clams, a nice slice of cheesecake—and the meal almost always ends up costing $65 no matter what you order.
The newest entry, Omaha Steakhouse, on East 187th Street, has immediately become one of the best steakhouses in New York, the meat wonderfully beefy, the creamed spinach silky, the portions a challenge for even the most boastful of trenchermen.
The best restaurant in the neighborhood, on 186th Street at Belmont, is the least typical. Roberto’s Ristorante is a treasure that an enormous number of people have found. The small, low-lighted room with its bare wooden tables is like a palette upon which the eponymous chef-owner creates his artistry. Skip the menu and just go for any of the night’s dozen or more specials—perhaps the long-braised rabbit with tomato and onions; the spaghetti cooked with leeks and porcini mushrooms in a pouch of foil; impeccably grilled octopus in a tangy vinaigrette; the massive, beefy sirloin slathered with Gorgonzola; and the superb, lemony torta with a perfectly made espresso—all accompanied by an excellent wine list with bottlings from every major region of Italy.
As much as Arthur Avenue is about eating, it is about community, too. It is a neighborhood still strongly, proudly attached to the Old Country—which means the regions of Campania, Calabria, Basilicata and Puglia—attested to by the photos from Italian fashion magazines adorning the hair salons, and the music stores stocking Italian CDs and videos.
It is decidedly not a place that revels in any kind of gratuitous association with “The Sopranos” or mobsters, whose occasional, silent presence offends the good people who live and work here—a population that now includes a number of Hispanics, Albanians and Croatians, who themselves have opened their own shops, like Kosova Meats & Grocery and the Gurra Cafe. Arthur Avenue’s form of tolerance is to encourage everyone to come in and shop, meet the purveyors, learn about the difference between a branzino and a sea bass, how to choose the best Parmigiano, and what to do with dried salted cod called baccalà.
If you’ve just finished a tour of the Bronx Zoo or the glories of the New York Botanical Garden, or perhaps taken your son or daughter to see about the prospects of going to Fordham University, just cross Fordham Road and turn onto Arthur Avenue. Two blocks down, the façades of the buildings change, and you start to see people double-parked and putting groceries into their trunks. You’ll see the guys slurping down raw clams outside Cosenza’s and sipping the best of all cappuccinos and having a slice of cheesecake at the new Arthur Avenue Cafe, which in its own novel way has become something of a hot spot in a neighborhood that expects the new to carry with it something of the old. And then, after a day of shopping here, or a pizza at Mario’s, or a night of good food and wine, you start to realize why this—not that other place—is the real Little Italy.
Frequent Sky contributor John Mariani is co-author, with his wife, Galina,
of the award-winning Italian American Cookbook (Harvard Common Press).
Addeo & Sons Bakery
2352 Arthur Avenue; 718-367-8316
Ann & Tony’s
2407 Arthur Avenue; 718-933-1469;
www.annandtonys-nyc.com
Arthur Avenue Cafe
2329 Arthur Avenue; 718-295-5033
Biancardi’s Meats
2350 Arthur Avenue; 718-733-4058
Borgatti’s Ravioli and Egg Noodles
632 East 187th Street; 718-367-3799
Calandra’s Cheese
2314 Arthur Avenue; 718-365-7572
Cosenza’s Fish Market
2354 Arthur Avenue; 718-364-8510
De Lillo Pastry Shop
606 East 187th Street; 718-367-8198
Dominick’s Bar and Restaurant
2335 Arthur Avenue; 718-733-2807
Full Moon Pizzeria
600 East 187th Street; 718-584-3451
Giovanni’s Brick Oven Pizza
2343 Arthur Avenue; 718-933-4141
Gurra Cafe
2325 Arthur Avenue; 718-220-4254
Kosova Meats & Grocery
2326 Arthur
Avenue; 718-563-0832
Madonia Brothers Bakery
2348 Arthur Avenue; 718-295-5573
Mario’s Restaurant
2342 Arthur Avenue; 718-584-1188
Mike’s Deli
2344 Arthur Avenue; 718-295-5033;
www.arthuravenue.com
Mt. Carmel Candy Store 621 East 187th Street;
718-367-6016
Mount Carmel Gourmet Food Shop
2344 Arthur Avenue; 718-933-2295
Mount Carmel Wine & Spirits
612 East 187th Street;
718-367-7833;
mountcarmelwine.ibsmall.com
Nick’s Variety Place 2344 Arthur Avenue;
718-367-7433
Omaha Steakhouse
566 East 187th Street;
718-584-6167
Roberto’s Ristorante
632 East 186th Street;
718-733-9503
Terranova Bakery
691 East 187th Street;
718-733-3827
