Since, for the time being, I am unable to write about or review New York City restaurants, I have decided instead to print a serialized version of my (unpublished) novel Love and Pizza, which takes place in New York and Italy and  involves a young, beautiful Bronx woman named Nicola Santini from an Italian family impassioned about food.  As the story goes on, Nicola, who is a student at Columbia University, struggles to maintain her roots while seeing a future that could lead her far from them—a future that involves a career and a love affair that would change her life forever. So, while New York’s restaurants remain closed, I will run a chapter of the Love and Pizza each week until the crisis is over. Afterwards I shall be offering the entire book digitally.    I hope you like the idea and even more that you will love Nicola, her family and her friends. I’d love to know what you think. Contact me at loveandpizza123@gmail.com—John Mariani

To read previous chapters go to archive (beginning with March 29, 2020, issue.

 

CHAPTER THREE

    Nicola Santini loved Columbia University, with its campus dominating Morningside Heights and straddling its way up, down and across Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue to 120th Street.  She felt a personal pride in the fact that the campus architecture was done in the Italian Renaissance style, dominated by the neo-classical Low Library, whose hundred-foot-tall dome paid homage to Rome’s Pantheon.  It was a sober, classic style, in deliberate contrast to the Neo-Gothic architecture of Yale and Princeton and the Georgian brick of Harvard. Nicola was equally proud that she was among those second- and third-generation Italians from the Bronx who were accepted at the Ivy League school, and she was sure that when her genius brother Tommy graduated from Bronx High School of Science, he would have his pick of any university he wished to attend.  Nicola relished the musty smell in the halls of academia, the echoes of voices and footsteps in rooms with such high ceilings, even the cigarette and pipe smoke that lingered in the student lounge at Hamilton Hall and behind the massive oak doors of every professor’s office. 
        In her first semester at Columbia, Nicola nursed a slight inferiority complex, believing that her fellow students might be far more accomplished than she was, better traveled, from wealthier neighborhoods than her own.  Also, the fact that she was a day student did not engage her much with those who lived on campus, and she deliberately chose not to join one of the sororities, sensing that her background might preclude her and that her slight Bronx accent might cause other students to wink at each other.
        In Belmont, where just about everyone was Italian, she had never endured a single act of bigotry—except that the older Italians constantly made cracks about neighbors who came from different provinces in the Old Country.  The Calabrians complained about the Neapolitans and the Neapolitans about the Sicilians, and everyone complained about the influx of Albanians and Croatians. But, out in the wider world of Columbia, Nicola waited for bigotry to rear its head.  In her first semester she even tried to modulate her effusive hand movements and keep her temper in tow, always eager for a serious argument about art or religion or politics but careful not to show too much of her Italian streak of frustration when confronted by someone she thought was being a total idiot.  Biting her tongue did not come easily to Nicola Santini.
        By the end of her freshman year, however, there had been no such bigoted incidents, other than having to respond again and again to those naïve enough to ask her, “So, up where you live, do you know, like, Mafia guys?”  Nicola hated the question, which seemed inevitable upon meeting non-Italians, and she forced herself to hold in a desire to return such slurs in kind, especially towards the WASPs.  What she wanted to say to them was, “You know, while my people were creating the Renaissance, yours were still painting their faces blue and worshiping trees.”   Instead, she’d raise her eyes, shake her beautiful head, and say, “I really thought you were smarter than to ask such a dumb question.”
        Belmont had, of course, a not undeserved reputation as a place where wiseguys once did business in their so-called sports clubs, drinking endless cups of sweet espresso and extorting everyone else.  Nicola knew a few of the younger assholes trying to wedge themselves into the mob, and she treated them with utter contempt as morons more in imitation of Hollywood stereotypes about Italians than as men of dubious local honor.

                                                Arthur Avenue at 187th Street

        But by the ‘80s the mob influence had faded, not least because few of the wiseguys even lived in the neighborhood any longer, moving instead to big houses in Westchester, on Long Island, or in New Jersey, only coming back to the old neighborhood regularly to eat the kind of Italian-American food they couldn’t find in towns with names like Hartsdale, Hicksville and Hackensack—ricotta-stuffed manicotti, wine-splashed shrimp scampi and crisply fried scungilli served at Bella Napoli, where, occasionally, Nicola would help out as a hostess on weekends  to make money for tuition.
        Having been nurtured on her mother’s and grandmother’s cooking, Nicola regarded Bella Napoli’s food as no better than standard Italian-American fare, with a huge menu listing the usual baked ziti, lasagna, veal parmigiana, and spaghetti and meatballs, all of it lavished with the same marinara sauce kept simmering in a large pot on the back of the stove all day.  Neither did she care for the way so much of the food was prepped far in advance, and she knew the ingredients used could be of better quality, especially since the restaurant sat right on a street lined with good meat, seafood, bread, vegetable and fruit markets.  (Her brother Tony swore he’d change all that if he ever got to buy the place.)            But she had no issue with Bella Napoli’s pizza, which was widely considered one of the best in the neighborhood.  In fact, the New York Daily News pronounced its margherita pie the best in the five boroughs, which resulted in the restaurant’s owner, Joe Bastone, receiving a wooden and brass plaque saying just that, which he proudly hung on a fake brick wall otherwise covered with signed black-and-white photos of celebrities eating his glorious tomato-mozzarella-basil-topped pizza with a perfectly charred and bubbly crust that was both crisp and chewy in all the right places.
    Joe had photos of dozens of the Yankees—the Bronx Bombers’ Stadium was just a fly ball away on 161st Street—Rizzuto, DiMaggio, Mantle, Maris, as well as every politician going after the Bronx vote—a smiling Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a squinting Mayor Ed Koch—as well as Italian-American movie stars and singers like Tony Bennett, Julius LaRosa, Vic Damone, Alan Alda, Robert DeNiro, Ben Gazzara, Connie Francis, and, of course, Dion DiMucci, lead singer for the Belmonts.   “I swear to God,” Joe would say, “I served that skinny kid enough damn pizza to sink the Andrea Doria!”
        But Joe always regretted he could never get Sinatra to come to Bella Napoli, despite numerous promises by neighborhood bullshitters who swore they knew him and would bring him by.  Joe had even left an empty spot open on the wall, “for when Sinatra comes in.”
        Nicola loved the streets around Arthur Avenue,  how they rang with the sounds of store owners singing "Oh Mari! Quanta suonno ca perdo per te”—“Oh, Marie, I have lost so much sleep over you."   The air smelled of garlic and tomato, fresh basil, and freshly ground coffee. Yankee pennants festooned the storefronts, and old men sat on folding chairs at their caffés to watch the soccer games from Italy, sip bittersweet liqueurs, and read the sports pages of Il Progresso.                                    

        Outside Randazzo’s Fish Market, people gobbled up fresh clams and oysters from the ice counter; baby lambs hung in the window at Biancardi’s Meats; in summer the pastry shops brought out freezers with Italian ices—lemon, chocolate, strawberry—scooped and patted into little pleated paper cups; at the Calandra Cheese store they sold fresh mozzarella and ricotta, along with aged provolone and parmigiano; across 187th Street at the Mt. Carmel Candy Store they still made New York egg creams—a masterfully rendered concoction of U-Bet chocolate syrup, ice cold milk and seltzer, no egg, no cream; at Borgatti’s Noodles, three generations of the family cut egg noodles into precise widths on a chugging machine that rang the rafters off the building; around the corner at Terranova Bakery, men with fire-scarred arms pulled steaming loaves from the city’s last coal-fired oven, as much an historical artifact as a symbol of the neighborhood’s refusal to change. In fact, just that past year, 1987, a movie called “Moonstruck” starring Cher and Nicholas Cage used Terranova for the bakery scenes.                                                                                 
                                                                          
   

    Nicola enjoyed greeting the customers at Bella Napoli, most of whom she knew, both those who lived in the neighborhood and those who had moved out of it.  They still came back to shop on the avenue and to eat in the restaurants, so the pizza oven at Bella Napoli was roaring from morning till midnight—although Joe Bastone would serve pizza after six p.m. only if the customer also ordered other food.  For in those days, full-fledged Italian restaurants played down the fact that they were once mere pizzerias—then considered the most common of street foods—no matter how popular the pies were everywhere in America.

Biancardi's Meats

    Ah, but what they did to pizza outside of New York!  At the drop of a moppine, Joe would roar his disgust for what pizza had become elsewhere—hell!—even in most parts of New York.  Pizzas had grown too large, too thick, packed with too many disparate ingredients of low quality, the mozzarella packaged and bought by the ton, the tomato sauce out of a goddamn can, and the crust! He could not even imagine how his competitors got the crust so grossly wrong, turning it into thick, bread-like rounds that ended up tasting like a goddamn hero loaf, chewy and nothing more.  And if you were on very good terms with Joe, which meant you were a regular customer who told him his pizzas were absolutely the best, he might confide that some of the Belmont pizzerias were turning out crap, then say, “I’ll kill you if you tell them what I said.”  Then he’d smile, wave his hands in the air and go back to the kitchen to stretch more dough—but never like those idiots who tossed the stuff in the air just for show.
    So, even though Joe Bastone had made his reputation and his principal profit from his fabulous pizza, he wanted people to love Bella Napoli for its other food, which was not nearly as good as those nonpareil pies.  Nicola never said a word about it, often waving off Joe’s offer to taste a new dish by saying she was on a diet, to which Joe would always say, “On a diet.  Always with the diet!  Nicky, you’re already too skinny for an Italian girl. You gotta put some meat on those bones, bella.  Men love the curves!”
        Nicola just nodded and smiled, well aware that she had none of the voluptuary curves of her sisters or of so many other Italian women in the neighborhood.  She most certainly had a beautiful body, slim hips, an enviable bust line, but it was her face and her olive skin, dark brown eyes and lustrous black hair that made every man who came through the door at Bella Napoli fall in love with her, and she’d developed a whole patter for warding off the more obnoxious guys who put the moves on her, sometimes while their wives or girlfriends were eating linguine three tables away.

                                                    Terranova Bakery

            Of course, she could also count on the protection of Joe and her brother Tony, who, with typical Italian bravado, both swore that Nicky was too good for any of them, a fraternalistic opinion she had long ago tired of hearing, as if she were so unusual, so distant, so virginal that no man could ever truly appreciate her for her cultured demeanor or those virtues that had been bred into her by her family.
    Not since high school, when she really was very skinny, had Nicola had a boyfriend, a kid who broke her heart by moving with his family to Glen Cove, Long Island, promising he’d call her and meet her in the city, but he never did after moving out of the neighborhood.  Afterwards she found most of the Bronx guys strutted their Italian macho with a swagger derived from watching the first four “Rocky” movies, even if the character of Rocky Balboa lived in Philadelphia.  Her grandmother had told Nicola more than once that it was not a bad thing to be a little bit of a snob. 

 

© John Mariani 2020

 
BELOVED ITALIAN-AMERICAN RESTAURATEUR
JOSEPH MIGLIUCCI PASSES AWAY

    I am very sorry to report that one of the great men of Italian-American food has passed away, owing to Covid-19. Joseph Migliucci, co-owner with his family of Mario’s restaurant on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, was part of five generations who kept the flame of Italian-American cooking alive and well.
    Mario’s opened a century ago in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx as a pizza window shop and expanded into a full-service restaurant in the 1930s. Mario Migliucci and his wife, Rose, with their children, Joe and Diane, then grandchildren, always ran the place like a true family restaurant, and it was where countless family parties were held week after week.
        After Mario’s death in 1998, and Rose’s ten years later, Joseph and his wife, Barbara, and today his daughter Regina, kept the restaurant going with the same degree of energy, passion and familial cordiality.
        You’d never leave Mario’s without a member of the family coming over to make sure you enjoyed your meal. Usually it was Joe, who demonstrated the rare but enduring benevolence that seems so often absent from today’s trendy new Italian restaurants and pizzerias around town, where people are rushed in, rushed out, with a “who-gets-what?” attitude and a stiff bill at the end.
    There are still double tablecloths, long banquettes, good lighting and carts are still wheeled from the kitchen brimming with pizzas, cold and hot antipasti, steaming pastas, generous main courses and old-fashioned desserts.
        The walls are lined with photos of everyone who dined there, from Paul Newman to Muhammad Ali and every New York Yankee, who came from the Stadium nearby.
    Joe was a big, sweet, gentle giant, beloved by everyone who frequented his wonderful restaurant. Mario’s pizzas were famous, the old-fashioned decor was cherished, and he rarely took a day off, not only because he convinced himself that something or somebody in the restaurant needed his attention, but because he knew that was where he was happiest. Mario's just celebrated its 100th anniversary, and Joe was there for 81 of them. I’ll miss him so much.