Why Don’t More U.S. Italian Restaurants Serve More Regional Italian Food?

There is no question that so many Italian restaurants in the U.S. are now serving food that comes very close to what you will find in Italy. And a whole lot more, meaning nearly every menu offers more or less the same dishes—carpaccio, burrata, cacio e pepe, gnocchi, veal Milanese, ribeyes, branzino and tiramisù—while appending it with dishes that really had their origins in America, including Caesar salad, chicken parmigiana, truffled parmesan fries and cheesecake.

What’s still missing, however, are more restaurants serving the food of the regions the chefs come from, or, if they are not Italian, at least trying to focus on a region no one else is showing off. For a very long while, beginning in the 1970s, the term “Northern Italian” and “Tuscan grill” were tossed around with next-to-no basis. “Northern” was simply a way of suggesting a restaurant’s food was lighter than the traditional Italian-America “red sauce” food like lasagna and spaghetti and meatballs. (France’s la nouvelle cuisine claimed the same thing while its proponents lavished their dishes with beurre blanc and crème fraîche.) It was little more than a farce because the old southern Italian dishes were included on the “northern” menus, while adding items like mushrooms (not wild, like porcini) to ravioli, dressing carpaccio with adulterated truffle oil and convincing guests that imported burrata in brine was a more sophisticated form of locally made mozzarella. Back in 1980 the New York Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton praised a restaurant named Il Nido, owned by a Tuscan, as a “triumph of Northern Italian Cuisine,” while praising southern dishes like Roman spiedino, linguine amatriciana, clams oreganatoand zabaglione.

Some years before opening their New York restaurant Osteria del Circo, the late Sirio Maccioni told his family it was going to serve rigorously authentic Tuscan food. One of this three sons replied, “That means we’re only going to have six dishes on the menu, three of them grilled.” When Circo opened, its menu had a few Tuscan items like Mama Maccioni’s zuppa alla frantoiana and cacciucco seafood stew, but the rest of the menu was made up of lobster salad, rotisserie chicken, yellowfin tuna and crème brûleé. Indeed, the conceptualized “Tuscan grill” concept, like “Super Tuscan Wines,” meant nothing at all except as a marketing phrase. You would be hard put to find Tuscan dishes like pappardelle con lepre (hare sauce), cibreo (a stew made of chicken innards), pappa al pomodoro (tomato stew with bread), stracotto (braised beef) or a pinzimonio of raw vegetables with anchovy dressing.

A few very rich dishes from Emilia-Romagna appear in the form lasagne verde and the dessert called zuppa inglese. But where does one go for marvelous dishes like tagliatelle alla duchesse (with chicken livers), bollito misto (boiled meats), brodetto (seafood stew) an erbazzone (Swiss chard tart)? Venice has given America carpaccio (from Harry’s Bar) and, in a few restaurants, risotto with seppie (cuttlefish but here usually made with bottled squid’s ink), but you almost never run across fegato alla veneziana (calf’s liver and onions).

The Ligurian basil and olive oil sauce called pesto is widespread on American menus, but not burrido seafood stew, sbira (tripe and potato) and cima alla Genovese (stuffed veal breast). It would be a rare restaurant that serves just about anything from that far northern region Trentino-Alto Adige whose cuisine is influenced by Austria, like potato spaetzle and sauresuppe made with tripe.

Owing to the hundreds of thousands of southern Italians from Naples, Abruzzo, Calabria and Sicily, a panoply of their dishes, most with tomato sauce, are readily available. But you can’t find timbalo (layered pasta and eggplant) from Campania, the red hot chile pepper-inflected pastas of Abruzzo, the savory licurdia onion soup from Calabria or the paper-thin bread from Sardinia called pane carasau or the culurzones pasta stuffed with peppers and potato.

There are scores of authoritative regional Italian cookbooks on American shelves containing hundreds of recipes—written by both Italian and non-Italian authors—Recipes from Paradise (Liguria) by Fred Plotkin; Venice by Russell Norman; The Cooking of Parma by Richard Camillo Sidoli; Soffrito: Tradition & Innovation in Tuscan Cooking by Benedtta Vitali; Naples at Table by Arthur Schwartz; and Food and Memories of Abruzzo by Anna Teresa Callen.

As mentioned, many chefs in Italian restaurants were not born in Italy, and in eastern cities fine cooks and restaurateurs from Albania, Montenegro, Slovenia and Croatia have had a major impact on the scene, though few put regional dishes on their menus.

I like to think, then, that Italian food in the U.S. is on the verge of a new phase when menus diverge from the tried-and-true into better representatives of a country with so many provinces and so many ingredients that we barely get to eat right now.