Italian Restaurants
Italian food was not as highly regarded in 1946 as it is now. The days of the chic and expensive Italian trattoria was decades away. While Jewish dishes like gefilte fish were found on the menu of many "American" steakhouses and restaurants. the very un-Italian "Spaghetti Italienne" was about the only "Italian" offering you were likely to find on the standard American-style restaurant. Macaroni and cheese, on the other hand, was considered an American dish and could be found everywhere.
Magazines had promoted Italian food to Americans in the 1920s and 1930s as an economy food, not a refined cuisine. It was considered too rustic for fine dining. To most non-Italians it began and ended with spaghetti and meatballs. The popular spaghetti recipes of the day were far from authentic, generally eschewing garlic and at times including among the ingredients bottled condiments like prepared horseradish, catsup and Worcestershire Sauce, flour as a thickener and canned tomato soup. To find real Italian food, you needed to go to an Italian restaurant.
Unlike other ethnic groups, Italians often stuck to their own cuisine when they ate out. You could find Italian restaurants wherever there were a lot of Italian residents like the Village, Little Italy, East Harlem or several neighborhoods in Brooklyn or the Bronx. By 1946 a number of Italian restaurants had opened in the West 40s near Times Square, where they were an inexpensive choice for a meal when you came to the neighborhood to catch a movie. A few chain spaghetti houses like Caruso's and Marco Polo's were scattered around Manhattan. Many of the restaurants on Steak Row on the east side of midtown Manhattan began as Italian restaurants and, although most people went to them for the steak, several had Italian dishes on their menu as well.
Italian-American cuisine was not typical of what most of the immigrant families had eaten in the old country. According to food historians, Italian restaurants began as boarding-house dining rooms to feed the early immigrants, many of them males who came without their families, intending to stay only long enough to make enough money to buy a farm or a business back home. The first wave of Italian immigration was much like the later immigrant wave from Mexico and Central America in this regard. The boarding house was a common business for widows back then. In Sicily and other parts of Southern Italy where most of the immigrants came from, farm laborers subsisted on bread, beans, cheese and greens from the fields. Pasta was a luxury. Chickens were for eggs and maybe a stew when the chicken was past its egg-laying prime. A roast chicken was for the occasional feast and meat was once or twice a year treat. However, the immigrants knew of the food that their more prosperous employers ate and in the US, where meat was available, they got to indulge in scallopines, meat balls and sausages. Perhaps this is why many of them decided to stay here or ended up returning to New York after a visit home. When these boarding house dining rooms became restaurants they were modeled after the trattorias of Naples and Sicily. Prohibition helped popularize them to a broader audience in Manhattan since some doubled as speakeasies.
The non-Italian diners who sought out the Italian restaurants in the Village thought of them as romantic hideaways, very different from the frenzied feeding barns of midtown and the financial district or the "see-and-be-seen" haute cuisine establishments. They were a popular choice for young couples on an inexpensive date. The tables were covered in checked tablecloths and lit by a candle stuck in a straw-wrapped chianti bottles. Artists and writers patronized Italian restaurants because stockbrokers, businessmen and bankers did not. Many Italian restaurants of the time offered non-Italian menu items as well. Like the Greeks, many Italians owned, ran or worked in restaurants that served cuisine other than their own, often French or pseudo-French, the only cuisine considered worthy of the name in 1946. The most notable of these was the The Colony, one of the elite dining establishments of the time, which had been founded and staffed by Italians, except for the head chef, who was French.