Drinking cappuccino after noon? Adding meatballs to spaghetti? And what’s with all the garlic? For expats, the US version of ‘Italian’ is an exercise in patience

What do real Italians think about New York's Italian food?

An ocean away from home, Ombretta Bellomi is making her way across a roundabout in Manhattan, walking towards a brunch date with friends. Her long, dark, curly hair and bright fuchsia dress betray a sunny disposition.

But just as the Italian architect from Verona is about to step on to the final zebra crossing leading to her cafe destination, her smile morphs into a frown, and her pleasant chatter takes on the tone of the incensed.

“Too much garlic! Garlic everywhere,” Bellomi exclaims.

The 28-year-old, a New York resident for the last two years, has a problem with how Italian food is done in the US.

“It makes me want to cry,” she says, entirely seriously.

Garlic, you see, is not quite the staple of Italian cuisine Americans think it is. Depending on who you speak to, onions are a controversial ingredient too – and don’t even think of ever combining the two in a single dish.

The idea of ingredient misuse provoking tears may appear a little drastic, but Bellomi is hardly alone at having an emotional reaction to Italian food faux pas. After all, Americans are messing with their grandma’s grandma’s grandma’s recipes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Italian pastries at Eataly, the artisanal Italian food and wine marketplace in New York. Photograph: Richard Levine/Alamy

Giacomo Silvestris, a 39-year-old director of operations for Italian CAI foods in New York, says that the way in which non-Italians drink cappuccino makes him faint. Drinking one at any other moment of the day apart from breakfast-time is unacceptable, he says.

Drinking a cappuccino at the end of lunch or dinner, or worse still, together with one of those meals is what provokes the most intense reaction from Silvestris (wide eyes, hand gesticulation).

Waiters at bars in cities across Italy have been known to refuse to serve tourists asking for the mistimed beverages. You can order one before noon, or simply forget it.

“The cappuccino is the meal,” Silvestris pronounces definitively. “The only food you can have it with is a croissant – that you eat at the bar in the morning.”

Silvestris moved to New York from his native Milan, where he co-owns one of the fashion city’s coolest eateries. He says that coming to terms with what passes as “Italian” here in the US has been an exercise in patience.

“Fettuccine alfredo are not a thing in Italy,” Silvestris continues as calmly as possible. As he speaks, he slows down, making every single syllable count.

Alfredo pasta may never be served to the well-heeled and bohemian Milanese clientele Silvestris was used to back home, but in the US it has become a staple in many restaurants that brand themselves Italian.

In Italy, the dish is most similar to what Italians call pasta burro e parmiggiano (pasta with butter and parmesan cheese). Italians eat this, but at home, and would never dream of ordering it in a restaurant, says Simona Palmisano, 37, a Roman native and tour guide who recently settled in New York.

Palmisano explains that in Italy, this way of making pasta is often referred to as pasta del cornuto – which translates as “cuckold’s pasta”, because making it betrays an absence of time or care put into the simple meal, with the consequential assumption that a wife’s [romantic] attention must be elsewhere.

The even more popular way of serving pasta alfredo in the US – with chicken – is beyond imaginable.

It is not just poultry and pasta that are not allowed to mix – meat and pasta very rarely make it on to the same plate. Pasta is one course (primo) and meat is another, fully separate course (secondo).

“Except for in one particular region of the south [of Italy], where they put very small meatballs in their tomato sauce, we would never put meatballs in pasta. Who has ever heard of spaghetti meatballs?!” Silvestris exclaims.

His rhetorical question rings funny when uttered in America, where spaghetti-meatball as a dish is the most quintessential of America’s take on Italian food (think The Lady and The Tramp kiss scene, or Clemenza in The Godfather).

With pasta, Silvestris explains, come rules. And those rules are non-negotiable.

“Pasta is a ritual for Italians. You can mess with anything but not the pasta. There are some rules that come with cooking pasta, rules that you never change.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Southern Italian tomato pasta. Photograph: Sarah Lee

The rules for pasta making are long and exhaustive, but the most often repeated ones are:

• No oil in the boiling water, ever (you stir the pasta every few minutes as it cooks so that it won’t stick).

• You are absolutely never allowed to add cheese to a seafood pasta recipe.

• You match pasta shapes with specific sauces, and some can never be combined (porcini mushrooms go with pappardelle or tagliatelle, for instance, absolutely not with spaghetti).

• Pasta is always al dente (very slightly undercooked).

• You finish cooking pasta in its sauce after you have drained it from the boiled water; you never dollop the one on top of the other.

“Pasta and its sauce should be combined like salad and its dressing,” says Jason Spiehler, Palmisano’s husband. “The sauce should never be overabundant in order to allow the pasta and its grain to also be tasted as the standalone delicacies that they are.”

As he makes his way about their New York kitchen where the couple are exhibiting signature Italian hospitality, Spiehler motions towards an olive oil bottle his wife had placed on the table.

“You bought a Californian? Do you think it’ll be any good?”

Palmisano shrugs, and says she is willing to give it a try.

Italian imports are much harder to trust these days: you do not know where the olives have come from. A good, quality olive oil is worth every single extra penny, the couple says, and such rules are valid for everything you eat.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mini cannelloni in a shop in Milan. Photograph: Alamy

Spiehler recently helped launch a Greenwich Village food tour in collaboration with Italian American celebrity chef Mario Batali, whose cooking style has been inspired by “authentic” Italian cooking.



Part of that philosophy is shopping like a chef, he says: letting what looks good at the market or at the store dictate what you buy, rather than a shopping list.

Perhaps, then, the most authentic answer to Italian cooking in the US would be not cooking Italian at all, but simply making a trip to your local farmer’s market and thinking how you might use a northern spy apple in a salad.

Serena Bass, an executive chef at Lido, a popular Italian restaurant in Harlem, operates along these lines of fresh quality ingredients and simple recipes that change according to the season.

Bass, an author who owned a New York catering company for three decades, calls Lido’s food “Italian-ish”, “Italian food with fuzzy edges”.

The 69-year-old is not afraid to break Italian food rules, as long as the food tastes the best it possibly can.

“We are very purist about our ingredients,” Bass says. The handmade pasta is made by a family down the road in Brooklyn. No need to go all the way to Italy. “Italians understand the purity, the un-messed-up flavors,” she says.

But Bass, who is defiantly British and has strong words for anyone who thinks British people are unable to cook, is unafraid of taking food invention from there.

One of her favorite things on Lido’s menu?

The Amalfi lemon tart, which is made – of all things – with saltine crackers.

“Putting saltine crackers in a lemon tart would never hold up in Italy,” she admits. “But if they [Italians] tasted it, they could cry because the lemon tart is so good.”

Shedding tears for rules that are broken for good reasons then, this time.

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