Looking back, it only makes sense that I too sought out the communities, restaurants, and even the specific pastries that have carried on the legacy of our Italian heritage for four generations. It was so instinctive I didn’t even realize I was doing it. Didn’t every student at Oberlin College regularly make the hour-long drive from rural Ohio to downtown Cleveland just to pick up a few cannoli at Corbo’s Bakery? Or wake up early all through their 20s for handmade mozzarella and cavatelli from Caputo’s Fine Foods in Brooklyn? What young adult doesn’t keep a wine journal full of carefully peeled-off labels and a handwritten record of who they drank what with?
Yet my kids have seen only fragments of the people and food that have defined so much of my life. After my grandmother passed, Italy no longer felt like the mother ship, and the younger generation’s Italian Americanness faded with assimilation. Red sauce became just one of many things on our menus. My kids have never done the chicken dance with 200 relatives at a wedding, can’t pronounce sfogliatelle, and haven’t had to eat an Italian feast followed by a Thanksgiving dinner in one sitting.
So one chilly week this past November, I decided to give them a crash course, inviting them along on a slightly unhinged 700-mile road trip to revisit as many of my life-defining Little Italies as we could. They gamely agreed, mostly because they didn’t have a choice (they’re 12 and 10) and my wife was on a work trip and unable to talk me out of it. This would be a red sauce pilgrimage. It would take us to cities I hadn’t visited in years, even decades in some cases. It would, I hoped, not just feel like a trip back in time, but a glimpse into how Italian American food continues to shape this country—and us.
The itinerary was ambitious. Setting out from Philadelphia, we continued north to Worcester and east to Boston’s North End, camping out on the floor of my mom’s apartment just outside the city, using her freezer to firm up ice packs for our ever-growing mountain of leftovers. Then there was a jaunt through Providence, Rhode Island, and New Haven, Connecticut, before heading back home. I took a separate solo detour to Brooklyn as well.
Here, I am sharing the best of the old-school, new-school, and must-do restaurants, bakeries, dishes, and neighborhoods we visited and loved during those four tomato-stained days. I am happy to report that the legacy of red sauce endures. Not just as an isolated set of islands, distinct from our wider restaurant culture, but happily mixing with it, and sometimes even reinventing itself along the way. After the trip my kids remarked that I had taken them to “hidden places”—the type they might have walked by without noticing but felt immediately familiar once inside. Because if you know where to look, Italian American food is everywhere, and its future is bright. Red, cheesy, and bright.
