How Did Italian Food Conquer the World?

Doesn't that just make you think of Bavaria?

I’m not disputing the title of John F. Mariani’s How Italian Food Conquered the World, since like Mariani, I’ve seen Italian restaurants all over the world, with some particular hot spots. In a recent trip to Kolkata, India, I noticed there were several Italian restaurants. Even though some were recommended by the locals, I did not eat in them.[1]

Nor did I eat in Italian restaurants in Japan. Japanese restaurants typically display photos or models of the food. In a land where there’s a cuisine built around the artful arrangement of food (kaiseki), Italian food gets presented as something you might refuse to eat on a dare. Even the worst red sauce joint might look at it and say, “did you just hurl it on the plate?”[2]

Then there was the trip to a town in Germany where it seemed that Italian restaurants outnumbered the German ones (and if you got tired of wurst and sauerkraut, well, there was Italian), including one where Germans sang Italian songs while waiters served Italian dishes. Many of these Italian restaurants are staffed by Italians. To make it clear: I am not disputing Mariani’s contention, just wondering if he’s made his case.

A small error of geography.

His book gets off to a shaky start, since on pages 7 and 10, I found two errors of fact. First tells us that vomitoria were rooms were Romans would force themselves to vomit so they could go back to eating; these tales of bulimia in antiquity are fantasies based on a fourth-century word for “stadium exit.”

Nor is it the case that Vasco da Gama visited Calcutta (or Kolkata, founded 1690) in 1498. How could he? He sailed to Calikat (modern Kozhikokde). Kolkata is Northwest India, Kozhikode in Southwest India, and they’re only separated by about a thousand miles, so just a small sloppy mistake, likes those plates of pasta in Japan.

Another of Mariani’s problems is that as a food and travel writer for Esquire, his real expertise is in destination restaurants, not food history. Does he make the case that Italian fine dining is how Italian food conquered the world? No. Does he know a lot about Italian fine dining. Yes. Does he name drop like a status-hungry socialite? Absolutlely.

Take these two sentences from the end of a paragraph:

Living above the restaurant until she died at the age of 97, Bice was known for her egalitarian approach to her guests, rich or not, famous or from nowhere, and she got along with everyone. Once when Sophia Loren entered the room, everyone applauded.

Can we assume that those who were neither wealthy nor famous (like humble and obscure Sophia Loren) were applauded when they walked into Bice? The next paragraph tells that restaurant was always packed when the designers showed off their collections in Milan. On this one page, Mariani finds room to reference Gina Lollabrigida, Ingrid Berman, Franco Zeffirelli, Gianni Versace, before he gets to Sophia Loren, and the fashion houses Burberry and Gucci.

Was it through Italian food nudging French food aside as fashionable dining that Italian food conquered the world? Given that those restaurants in Japan and India and some in Germany were the more humble sort (red sauce joints, really), it’s tough to say that the success of the Bice Group (from that one restaurant in Milan to locations around the world) was conquest for anything other than one company specializing in upscale dining.

Not wholly trustworthy.

It’s not long after this that in his discussion of upscale dining that Mariani simply asserts that by this point Italian food had conquered the world, without any evidence of this sudden capitulation. When did that happen and how?

Although it’s a bit of a non-sequitur in his telling (though undoubtably important in how Italian food conquered the world), Mariani has a good chapter early in the book on the rise of the Mafia-themed pizza parlor, part of a broader context of Italian food wrapped in ethnic stereotypes and slurs, with sniggering suggestions that Italian-Americans can’t really master English and they all have connections to organized crime. Long after Italian immigrants stopped serving up low-grade Italian-American food, it’s been adopted by corporate restaurant concepts.

In a way, it’s not far from the upscale dining, often just a different sort of restaurant packaging. Mariani doesn’t cover how Italian restaurants on every level aren’t family trattorias, but packaged by corporations (from Bice and Il Fornaio with roots in Italy to Buca da Beppo founded in the Midwest and owned by Planet Hollywood). That Italian food can be readily marketed on a global scale is part of this story. (The only type of food more relentlessly churned out by corporate America is, of course, the burger joint, though that’s only one segment of dining, while Italian restaurants can be found in several.[3] The number Dunkin’ Donuts locations in Germany indicate that the next level down is open for conquest.[4])

In Mariani’s telling, Italian food had yet to conquer the world when any supermarket in the United States already had extensive quantities of Italian food in their aisles. Again, this is Mariani focusing on the sort of dining he writes about in Esquire and completely failing to look supermarket shelves which have been home to Italian foods for decades. Ragú, now owned by a Japanese company, was founded in New York in 1937. I grew up with ads that told Massachusetts residents that “Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti day.”[5] Mariani doesn’t mention how the Italian food on supermarket shelves is increasingly the product of global food conglomerates. Maximizing the profits of companies with no connection to Italy or people of Italian descent is part of that story. When someone in the Midwest pours a jar of sauce from a company headquartered in Japan on pasta from a company headquartered in Spain and tells themself that they’re eating Italian, Italian food has conquered the world (without any actual involvement by Italians).

At turns inaccurate, gossipy, and too focused on Mariani’s experience going to nice restaurants for Esquire, How Italian Food Conquered the World never actually answers how. Yet, Italian food really did conquer the world. Great title. The book, not so.

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1. I ate Indian food in India, mostly Bengali food, since I was in West Bengal. I didn’t actually trust the Bengali cooks to turn out Italian food I wanted to eat. Besides, there was so much good, authentic Indian food to have.  ↩
2. Again, why eat ugly, poorly-made Italian when there was so much good local food to eat? Eating in Japan was an experience of almost no two restaurants alike (I had sushi more than once), since there’s such specialization in Japanese food. There was no overlap between the place the served only eel, the place served only crab, and the place that served only fugu. That’s a different blog post.  ↩
3. Throwing this in a footnote. Burger and pizza: fast food. Pasta places are typically family dining. Things slide from there to casual dining to fine dining. These are best typified by the beverage choices: no wine, house red or house Chianti (glasses and carafes only), a wine list, an expensive wine list.  ↩
4. As much as I like their Bavarian cream donuts, I just don’t see myself having one in Bavaria.  ↩
5. Founded on Prince St. in Boston in 1912 (just blocks from the site of the 1919 molasses flood). It is now owned by the US subsidiary of a Spanish corporation.  ↩

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