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Authentic Italian Cuisine in the US? Mr. May’s Possible Mission
(March 2, 2009)
Interview with Tony May, the owner of some of the most exclusive Italian restaurants and founder and president of GRI-Gruppo Ristoratori Italiani . His legendary San Domenico Restaurant at Central Park closed just one year ago to be replaced by the bigger and more youthful SD26
Interview with Tony May, the owner of some of the most exclusive Italian restaurants and eateries in New York City. His legendary San Domenico Restaurant at Central Park closed just one year ago to be replaced by the bigger and more youthful SD26.
He is the founder and president of GRI-Gruppo Ristoratori Italiani (Group of Italian Restaurateurs), whose aim is to elevate the standards and understating of authentic Italian cuisine in this country. GRI is based in New York and implements Italian culinary programs throughout the United States, by which American and Italian-American students and cooks learn about the main ingredients and recipes of Italian culinary tradition.
We met him at the Wedding Café (16 East 38th Street), one of his restaurants.
First of all, I would like you to tell me about your first experiences in this country. You came here 40 years ago and Italians here suffered great discrimination…
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| Tony May with daughter Marisa and Executive Chef Odette Fada. San Domenico Restaurant Closed One Year Ago to be replaced by the more youthful SD26 |
When I came here in the USA in 1963 Italian culture was not strong at all. People spoke a language I did not understand and ate food I never had before. It was very different from today. Today we are enjoying a much better understanding of Italian cuisine by Americans thanks to the efforts of many experts in the field who came to America in the last 40 years: while the early Italian immigrants were very poor, and sometimes illiterate and uneducated, today more and more graduate and middle and high-class people are coming here. The cultural input now is entirely different, so things are getting better.
However, after a tough beginning I had a fast and ascending career. During my first twenty years in America, I worked in international cuisine restaurants. Among them, the Rainbow Room. I started working there a few months after I arrived in America: in 1964 I was the captain; in 1965 the Maitre de Maison; in 1968 the manager; in 1973 I bought it. The truth is that if you knew what you were doing, you could make a career. There were very few Italian restaurateurs in New York, so I found a perfect environment for my business plans. I had a mission: educate American people about authentic Italian cuisine.
How did you fulfill this goal?
In 1979 I founded the GRI-Gruppo Ristoratori Italiani together with the Italian- American Chamber of Commerce. Our mission is to improve the image of Italian cuisine through education. We do this in two different ways: at the institutional level we established scholarships while at the practical level every year we take our colleagues to Italy.
I know that you come from Torre del Greco, a town near Naples, in Campania. That territory has a strong culinary tradition. Is it present at all in the menus of your restaurants?
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| Tony May welcomed i-Italy in one of his restaurants in Midtown Manhattan, The Wedding Cafè |
I propose only Italian cuisine, the national one. Territorial traditions would keep us at the “trattoria” level while we have to “graduate” and let people understand that our food can also be served in elegant surroundings. China plates and silver dinnerware in our restaurants must substitute the rustic tablecloths of the trattorias: while the latter maintain the traditions, the former make them evolve.
How distant is the Italian food served in American restaurants from the authentic tradition?
The early Italian immigrants created a new kind of cuisine, the Italian-American one. This is because they had to work with the ingredients they found here, so they had to substitute and transform some of the recipes according to what they had and didn’t have at their disposal. Although they had good intentions, they bastardized Italian cuisine. If they had had the possibility to import the necessary ingredients and products, they would not have done it. Today, instead, we have the assortment of ingredients we need, thus it is our duty to spread the real Italian culinary culture. The products denote the kind of cooking that we serve: the better they are, the better is the result.
How did the American public react to this wave of authenticity? Did people appreciate it right from the beginning?
It took a while. You cannot change the perception of Italian cuisine all of a sudden! This is why the fulfillment of the GRI’s mission passes through education: I think that it is the only way to win this battle. We must teach the students our traditions, we must educate them about the quality of our products and the culture of the Italian table. Today there is a deep ignorance about Italian ingredients: as an example, there still are people who do not understand the difference between grana padano and parmigiano and can not discern among different kinds of vinegar. We must give them the instruments to do so: this is fundamental if we want people to appreciate real Italian cuisine.
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| The new restaurant SD26 will open in September |
How do you feel the economic crisis is going to affect its popularity?
I do not think this is going to happen. The quality of our products will remain the same, so people will still love eating Italian. Maybe the quantity of imported goods will diminish and the prices on the menus too. But that’s all: I don’t foresee great consequences on the long run. Eating out will always remain an option for American people: it is part of their lifestyle. And we all know that they prefer Italian
Last year you closed the legendary San Domenico Restaurant in Central Park, but shortly you will start a new business, the SD26…
Yes, the new restaurant will open in September. We planned it to respond to the needs of the new generations. Nowadays when people go out they want to eat in a relaxing and informal environment. Even older people want to look young; they wear jeans and sneakers and look for modernity. The new restaurant will answer this growing demand by offering the consumers a “younger” environment.
The idea of the meal itself has changed: now the public prefers to order smaller portions and taste a little bit of everything and give up the big traditional meal composed of different courses.
So it will involve a different approach to Italian cuisine, won’t it?
The quality of our food will not be affected. We will still produce our own pasta, pastries and crèmes. We will just serve them in a different way, that’s all.
We will give our clients the possibility to eat at both the bar and the dining room. Every recipe will evolve around a product, such as capperi from Pantelleria, oregano from Puglia, olive oil from Tuscany, chocolate from Modica, speck from Alto Adige, so as to highlight how important the quality of the products is for the final result.
Isn’t this approach very similar to the slow food idea?
Carlo Petrini came up with a very good idea a number of years ago. The concept was welcomed and I respect it too. It is a tribute to good quality and genuine products. Actually I have been supporting these two elements as fundamental for Italian cuisine for a much longer time. I made them the mission of the GRI, while the slow food idea is really a business, a very remunerative one. My mission has no lucrative purposes, it is just an initiative promoted to benefit my “madre patria”, my homeland.
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Interesting, but....
An interesting interview. However, I find some of Mr. May's observations a bit questionable. The notion that "real" Italian food is a national cuisine best served in "elegant surroundings," by which he means the expensive restaurants for which he is known, is highly debatable. I've been to some of these types of ristorante, and I just don't get them, with their menus a mix of the north, the center, and the south. I'd much prefer a place whose chef has mastered a regional cuisine and can do wonderful things with it. Mr. May's from Campania, yet he disdains the idea of a regional, Campanian restaurant. But Campania's cuisine is superb, and I for one would welcome a really outstanding (and affordable!) place serving the dishes of Napoli, Sorrento, Capri, Ischia, etc.
I also don't agree that Americans are ignorant of real Italian cuisine. The level of knowledge and sophistication among American "foodies" has risen remarkably over the past few decades. People like Marcella Hazan, Giuliano Bugialli, Mario Batali and others have had a large and positive impact on Italian food in this country. And genuine Italian ingredients that didn't used to be available in America are now easily found. My chain supermarket in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for example, sells imported blood orange juice from Sicily and DOP tomatoes from Campania.
I also question his comments about Slow Food. Although there have been commercial ventures inspired by/affiliated with Slow Food, both here and in Italy (e.g., shops, restaurants, and producers that sell food items grown and produced under Slow Food principles), my understanding is that Slow Food is primarily an organization, a movement, and an idea. Mr. May, however, most definitely is a businessman, unless he is in the restaurant business for purely altruistic reasons!
I agree, George...
George, I agree 100% with your observations. I thought I would add something else readers here might chew on. May responds to one question as follows:
"When I came here in the USA in 1963 Italian culture was not strong at all. People spoke a language I did not understand and ate food I never had before. It was very different from today. Today we are enjoying a much better understanding of Italian cuisine by Americans thanks to the efforts of many experts in the field who came to America in the last 40 years: while the early Italian immigrants were very poor, and sometimes illiterate and uneducated, today more and more graduate and middle and high-class people are coming here. The cultural input now is entirely different, so things are getting better."
Italian culture was indeed very strong pre-1963 in the US; it was, strictly speaking, a working-class culture with peasant origins. It's language, in turn, was also different in that there were formally uneducated people speaking their respective dialects that, in many cases, eventually transformed themselves into a patois often indigenous to their US locales. What, of course, is revealing here is May's use of terms and phrases such as "high class" and "things are getting better."
What May does not mention is that those "early Italian immigrants [who] were very poor, and sometimes illiterate and uneducated" actually paved the way for the "graduate and middle and high-class people [who] are coming here." To wit, these very poor immigrants are owed a great debt! Until this becomes common knowledge among all Italian Americans in the United States (born and socialized either here or in Italy), non Italian Americans, and Italians in Italy, Italian Americana will continue to have to climb that ever so steep slope of acceptance, that is, ahimè, also internal.
Class Assumptions
Ciao Anthony Yes, you're right about the class-based assumptions in Sr. May's comments. And of course it's not true about there not being any Italian culture in the US in 1963. That was my childhood, and my experience was of a pretty strong italianita' among my immediate family, relatives, and Italian American friends. As you say, it largely was a working class culture, which also was my experience. I think May's comments are indicative of a lack of understanding of Italian Americans' historical experience, which is fairly common among Italians. I think that's at least partly due to a lack of contact between Italy and the diaspora in the decades since the mass migrations. When I was a kid, my family still had some contact with relatives in Italy -- visits from our Sicilian relatives (who, interestingly enough, were better off than we were), Christmas cards and letters exchanged between us & them. As late as 1980, my paternal relatives were in contact with Naples and Avellino and contributed money and donations of goods (clothes, canned foods, etc) towards earthquake relief that year. But all that ended when the relatives -- my parents' aunts and uncles and other kin --started to die off. Today it seems to me there's a good deal of mutual incomprehension, and maybe even worse, between Italians and Italian Americans. A Sicilian woman I know who emigrated here told me that relatives and friends of hers in Sicily told her to avoid the Italian Americans, who of course were all cafoni. I detect some of that attitude in Sr. May's remarks, and obviously you do, too.
Indeed, I do...
George, you're so right in underscoring that most of us had, in general, a similar, cultural experience growing up in pre-1963 working-class, blue-collar Italian America. Those then who made it often remembered, or so I seem to recollect. Whereas some of those who have since come to post-war US, as part of the so-called "immigrazione di lusso," not only did not have any previous contact and/or knowledge of Italian Americans, but once they got here many seemed to have signed on to the Prezzolinian/Soldatian mode of considering Italian Americans; "cafoni" indeed was the word at least one of them used. Oh well! By the way, interesting surname for an Italian! Non ti pare? I guess that makes you Mr. Stephens (can't seem to get that "de" in there...) and me Mr. Drumms (not sure if the Italian onomatopoeia should be a double "r" or double "m")!