Italian restaurants in the U.S.

[Robert Schonfeld]

What, in your opinion are the strong points of Italian restaurants in the United States? What are the weak points? To what degree do Italian restaurants in the United States succeed or fail to replicate the experience available at comparable restaurants in Italy?

As a related question, why is there something called "Italian-American cooking", as evidenced by your own television series on the subject, when there is no such thing as "French-American cooking", to take just one other example?

[Lidia Bastianich]

Thank you for such a good question. The strongpoint of the Italian restaurants and food is its diversity and the gustatory experiences. Italian food makes nutritional sense and gives great pleasure enjoyment. It is fresh in most cases and is not elaborated food; it uses mostly natural products and has a great repertoire of traditional ingredients which are the base of its cuisine--such as Parmigiano Reggiano, Prosciutto di Parma, the selection of extra virgin olive oils, etc.

Italian cuisine at its best is simplicity in the kitchen, and simplicity is one of the most difficult things to execute. And sometimes I find that the execution is where the faults lie in Italian cuisine in the U.S.

Italian restaurants in the U.S. are coming ever closer to the real Italian experience due to the availability of the traditional ingredients and great produce in the U.S. However, the execution of the dishes by the individual chefs determine the actual dish, and it's inevitably determined by their familiarity with the authentic cuisine and the culture.

[Lidia Bastianich]

And one other thing....

Italian American cooking is the cuisine of adaptation of the early Italian immigrants to America in the late 1800s. (of which perhaps the French were much fewer).

Coming to America, the availability of many Italian products was non existent; therefore the adaptation of their rich Italian culinary tradition made with American ingredients yielded quite different results with many substitutions and adaptations along the way. For example the Sunday sauce cooked in Campania, especially in the city of Naples, is basically a sauce made of olive oil, fresh San Marzano tomatoes and a pork shoulder with some onions as a base. The Italian American version has lots of garlic, longer cooking times, some sugar, lots of dry herbs to bring forth the lack of flavor that the American tomatoes had.

In the end, the outcome is one of America's favorite cuisines--the Italian American cuisine--an excellent and very valid cuisine but a different one from what you find in Italy today.