One of Mimi Sheraton's favorite Village restaurants in her NYU student days was Mother Bertolotti's, an intimate downstairs restaurant on West 4th Street between Sixth Avenue and MacDougal. Sheraton's Brooklyn Jewish family never went to Italian restaurants when she was a child and the menu at Mother Bertolotti's was unfamiliar. Italian food was not as wildly popular in 1946 to non-Italians as it is today. Outside of Manhattan cosmopolites and Italians, the cuisine pretty much began and ended with spaghetti and meatballs. In her ignorance she once ordered Bel Paese for dessert and then, when the foil wrapped cheese arrived, she pretended to her companions, who had ordered the then obligatory spumoni (the forerunner to the Neapolitan ice cream found in supermarkets today ) and tortone, a popular almond-flavored frozen dessert, that she knew she had ordered cheese.
In 1947 Jane Nickerson reviewed the restaurant, a favorite of the Village Bohemian set for half a century. For $1.75 ($2 on weekends) the a la carte menu featured an hors d'oeuvre, soup, an entree, a main course, salad, dessert and coffee. The portions were large and the choices for each course were divided between what she called "Northern Italian" and American cuisine. For instance, a diner could have tomato juice, the standard opener for a meal at the time, or antipasto. The Italian soups, including minestrone, were a standout, Nickerson also recommended the "ossi buchi con risotto," veal cutlet parmigiana and "lasagne al forno." The restaurant was not open for lunch. It had a small bar but the "just cocktails" customer was frowned upon. The menu does not sound particularly "Northern Italian," by which Nickerson possibly meant it went beyond spaghetti and meatballs into other Italian-American dishes.