Italian Food in America. Verdict: Risky

At best.

"So, how are you tonight? Aside from being freezing cold and wet, probably. It's snowing pretty hard out there, huh?" the young waiter soliloquizes* by way of introducing himself. If you are a stray Italian who has wandered onto this site and wonders why this is: it is because in America, tips aren't automatically included in the bill. You have to remember to leave them at the end of the meal, of your own volition. This is irritating and requires you to calculate percentages and stuff like that. It also causes the waiters to share far more of their personal lives and/or opinions on such things as the weather than you probably care about. You guys definitely have the better system. (Beppe Severgnini has a hilarious chapter about this in one of his hilarious books; I believe it is called "Un Italiano in America". Or "Ciao, America" for the English version. And I am not being sarcastic. He really is hilarious.)

In any case, though, I wish I could just stop the guy mid-paragraph: 'relax. We're going to tip you. You don't have to befriend us. Now just shut up and let us read the menu in peace.' I mean, if we'd wanted to sit around being hungry while someone blathered on unintelligently about nothing, we could've just stayed home and turned on the tv.

"... and a great cheese tortellini in creamy alfredo sauce." He is evidently giving the specials. "I had it myself during my break," he enthuses. Fun fact.

And probably a bad decision on his part. Alfredo sauce, apart from being kind of gross, is probably like guaranteed heart failure. Particularly when poured over cheese tortellini.

Also, minus fifty points for mentioning Alfredo sauce at all. Apart from being kind of gross (I feel the need to reiterate this) it is sort of like "french dressing" (and "Italian dressing", for that matter) in that it has absolutely nothing to do with the country from which it purportedly hails. I can guarantee that if you stick a bottle of "french dressing" in front of a French person, they will laugh at you until they taste it, after which they will possibly clock you over the head with the bottle. I was explaining this point to a mixed group of Italians and Americans once, and mentioned "alfredo sauce" as a comparable example of this phenomenon; one of the Italians launched into such a rant I almost started to worry he was going to give himself a stroke.

So, Italian restaurants in America: don't serve alfredo sauce, because it will cause you to lose all of your credibility. Or do, because most of America seems to like it. Whatever.

Anyway, one "main course" later (it was actually primi if you want to get picky: risotto that was tasty but not really risotto and some very chewy gnocchi in an oddly tasteless sauce), the dessert menu yielded the following: cheesecake (okay...), fudge brownie (I think we lost our Italian theme), apple pie (ditto), profiteroles (these are actually French, but whatever), tiramisu (oh, wait, here we go), and a rather linguistically-challenged "torta de nona". Interestingly enough, that last did not seem to be in any way related to torta della nonna, though I can only assume that's what they were going for.

We chose the profiteroles, which were a crime against French cooking, but on the bright side, no one will ever know because they will think the whole thing was Italian. Sorry, Italy.

Anyway, conclusion: Italian food, generally speaking, is a lot better in Italy. And note that I say "generally speaking". This is because some of the best Italian food I have ever had was actually in America, in the town where I went to college, in the restaurant owned, interestingly enough, by the professor who taught Italian II.

So, actually, I guess that means that the real conclusion is that you have to try it to know for sure... but it's kind of at your own risk, so good luck with that.

*Soliloquizes looks very bizarre written down, but Merriam-Webster online confirms that 'to soliloquize' is indeed a verb. ... It's probably a little pretentious that I feel the need to put footnotes in my blog. Oh, well.