Ethnic Dining, Italian Style Essay Example for Free

Ethnic Dining, Italian Style Essay On Saturday, September 15, 2007 I dined at Frankie, Johnnie and Luigi, Too. This Italian style restaurant on Prospect Road in San Jose, California is renowned for its authentic food. The phone number at the establishment is 408-446-9644. The restaurant features home-style Southern Italian cuisine. They like to brag that they do traditional pizza pie and do not serve American Yuppie offerings. The menu includes pasta, naturally, along with veal and prawn dishes. Italian sausages were suggested by the wait-staff as well. The atmosphere is red-checkered table-cloth chic which makes it more upscale than a Pizza Hut but lets the diner know it is homely and not five star pretentious. Like any country, the food of Italy varies by region, with the areas which produce more pork given to sausages and ham dishes while milk producing lands serving up a cuisine laden with dairy. The south produces veal and seafood along with signature pastas. I chose the prawn penne. The Italian food served in the United States is often Americanized to the point that it would be virtually unrecognizable to a native Italian but Frankie, Johnny and Luigi, Too makes claims of being authentic. The manager, in a long talk with us at our table, mentioned that the foods of Italy came to this country with the immigrants but didn’t begin to enter mainstream America until post World War II when pizzerias began to flourish in large cities and Dean Martin sang That’s Amore, including a line that went, â€Å"When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore. It’s impact on America and American palates is subtle. Where American food is heavy on meat and potatoes the Italian cuisine is richer in flavor, using strong cheeses and cured meats as a savory more so than a main ingredient. Their olive oil is healthier than the hog lard and butter which Americans once used with abandon. The tomato, such an integral part of Italian regional food, was a gift from the New World over five hundred years ago but the Italians made it their own (Kotkin 2007) and brought it back to us in sauces cooked up by newly arrived immigrants. My dining experience was most pleasant and the samples I managed to glean from my dining companion’s platter added to the home-like atmosphere. The camaraderie was evident from the waiters to the manager who came by our table to inquire as to how we were getting along with our meal. It seemed to me that I could have been in a Southern Italian home in the middle of a holiday if I but used my imagination. I thoroughly enjoyed all aspects of the meal from the ante-pasta to the coffee I sipped at the close of the meal.