Little Italy north? (1947)

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:43 PM -0400 9/25/01, Grant Barrett wrote:
>On 9/25/01 14:05, "Grant Barrett" <gbarrett at WORLDNEWYORK.ORG> wrote:
>
>>  On 9/24/01 23:02, "Laurence Horn" <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
>>
>>>  Getting us hungry again, Barry.  I was struck by this application of
>>>  "the heart of Little Italy" to a quarter within East Harlem.
>>
>>  There are still a couple of classic, old-school, old-New York Italian
>>  restaurants in the neighborhood, though I can't for the life of me remember
>>  them right now.
>
>Rao's is one of them.
>
>http://www.nycity4u.com/mainFood&Dinning.htm
>
>"Rao's contains only 12 tables, which makes it next to impossible to score a
>reservation here unless you're Martin Scorsese or another one of Rao's
>favorite patron. Closed on weekends, Rao's only offers one seating weekdays.
>Addr: 445 E 114th St
>Subway: (6) to 116th St
>Tel: (212)722-6709"
>
Rao's is definitely renowned, not only through the restaurant itself,
but its widely distributed (if rather pricey) jars of sauce.  But my
point wasn't that there aren't well-established and robust colonies
of Italian people and restaurants in various enclaves of the five
boroughs (not to mention the suburbs), but that the only one referred
to as "Little Italy" was the lower Manhattan one.    Evidently I'm
wrong in this regard and it's more like "Chinatown", where the
default one is in a certain place (right next to Little Italy in
fact) but there can be other Chinatowns in Queens or Brooklyn or
Harlem or wherever.  I'll take Steve Boatti's word that the area
around Rao's is (also) Little Italy, I just had never heard that use
of the term, which I'd always taken to be a geographical as well as
ethno-culinary label.

larry