The New York City Little Italy of my youth is long gone, the once-sprawling immigrant neighborhood now reduced to a handful of red sauce joints that cater to Big Apple tourists. As an Italian-American kid growing up on Long Island, I cajoled my parents into taking me to Grotta Azzurra for fried zucchini or to Caffe Roma for cannoli, and I begged for repeated trips to the Feast of San Gennaro, where the visceral aromas of grilled sausage and peppers, the masses of revelers and the flashing lights from the midway rides transported me far from the banalities of suburban life. Was that San Gennaro an authentic reflection its roots in 1920’s lower Manhattan, when Neapolitans in New York started a one-day religious celebration of their patron saint? No. But where else were my parents going to allow me to consume a paper bag’s worth of fried dough sprinkled generously with powdered sugar?
I wasn’t compelled to return to San Gennaro in two decades until this year—the 93rd annual feast, to be exact—primarily because I hadn’t wanted to tarnish my childhood memories. But social media coverage piqued my interest, and to my surprise, my first visit brought everything rushing back: the bags filled with zeppole; the rows of stacked cannoli; the decorative designs spanning street lamps overhead. I choked up. I hadn't expected this festival to remain so, well, festive given the long, slow decline of Little Italy, squeezed out by burgeoning Chinatown and trendy Nolita around it.
Sure, the Feast is now stretched to almost two weeks and known more for its cannoli– and meatball-eating contests than its Roman Catholic rites, and the dining options are kitschy in comparison to the sophisticated interpretations of Italian food that dot the island of Manhattan these days. The makeshift stalls with griddles covered in sausage wheels and sizzling peppers and onions at San Gennaro now share the streets with a few trendy upstarts like the Meatball Shop and Arancini Bros, as well as with the old-school Little Italy mainstays, whose patios fill with tourists eating giant plates of over-sauced, overcooked pasta during the Feast. A few of the newer restaurants in the neighborhood seem curiously cut off from San Gennaro, including Parm, the mini-chain known for its chicken parm heroes. The patrons at the touristy spots look happy, but maybe they don’t know that Michael White’s Osteria Morini would serve them a much more satisfying Italian meal just a few blocks away?
But as I passed a lone elderly woman in a house dress standing over a plate of fried clams at Umberto’s Clam Bar while chaos whirred around her, I thought about how New York City’s mad capitalistic progression can’t stop a few strong traditions from standing pat. The woman lifted the last shell to her mouth, her face stern and seemingly resolved to tune out everything around her, yet you could tell by the satisfied look in her eyes as she returned the shell to the paper plate that San Gennaro had, however briefly, soothed her soul, as it had mine.