It’s 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning and I’m on the line at Mike’s Deli one of the best-known food stores and cafes in the Arthur Avenue Retail Market in Belmont, the area known as “the Little Italy of the Bronx” deciding between an order of rice balls or eggplant rollatini to go with my dinner later that evening. The deli’s founder, the much-loved Mike Greco, who was known as “the Lion of Belmont,” died in 2019. His father, Gennaro, had come to New York from Naples in 1915, and his son, David, who now runs the business, like his father before him, is practically royalty in these parts. He even sells a sandwich called the “King David” sopressata with four-year-old Parmesan, since you’ve asked.
Along with others in Harlem, the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, the retail market itself was established in 1940 by Mayor Fiorella La Guardia in a bid to clean up New York’s unregulated street food outlets.
A century ago, there were several Italian neighborhoods in and around New York, the most well-known being Manhattan’s Little Italy. But now they’re practically all gone, victims of a shifting demographic, or, as in Manhattan itself, supplanted by the behemoth that is “Eataly.”
But the Belmont section of the Bronx which is to say Arthur Avenue between 184th and 189th streets, with a few minor forays off into the side streets has retained much of its Italian culture and, while the area is now predominantly Latino, wonderful vestiges of its Italian cultural and food heritage remain. My recent visit reminded me just what exceptional produce you can still find in the shops in these few streets and made me regret having stayed away so long.
Cheese shops, grocery stores and salumerie, punctuated by bakeries, butcher shops and houseware stores, abound in Belmont, where I had started my day some time earlier with a smooth espresso a few doors along from the retail market, at DelLillo’s Pastry Shop. In my view, they make the best cookies, cakes and Italian desserts on the block. Fueled on caffeine and almond cookies, I next stopped by Chris Borgatti’s ravioli and egg noodles shop, where they have been making pasta and cutting it to order since Chris”™s grandfather moved to the area from Emilia-Romagna in 1935.
Like many artisan producers, Borgatti now working with his, son, also Chris is a specialist, producing only ravioli, lasagna, manicotti and egg noodles, the noodles available in a handful of widths. The noodles also come in myriad “flavors” tomato, mushroom, spinach, basil and squid ink, to name but a few and the featherlight ravioli are filled with top quality ingredients. (The lobster ravioli would make a very swish starter or even main course for a celebratory dinner.) Everything is made fresh daily.
Although the Borgattis have embraced the internet and ship their pasta nationally, Chris Sr. is keen to stress that the shop itself needs real-life, real-time visitors. Without it, the shop, the business and eventually what remains of Little Italy of the Bronx will die.
It’s a warning echoed a few doors away by Carlo Carciotto, who, with his father Orazio, produces some of New York’s finest mozzarella in a pint-sized dairy at the back of their Casa della Mozzarella store. It’s a fascinating process that visitors to the store can ask to see the breaking up of the curd and its immersion in vast basins of hot water and energetic stirring with a paddle the size of an oar before the mozzarella is stretched and formed. The result is ambrosial-tasting mozzarella, which you can buy alone, as bocconcini, or wrapped in prosciutto. Patience is a necessity in the narrow store as you wait your turn to be served, but the quality of the products make it worthwhile.
The avenue named for the 21st president of the United States, Chester A. Arthur is home to sausage makers too, like brothers Antony and Sal Biancardi, whose grandfather Antonio started in business here in 1932. Their Calabria Pork Store is known for its “sausage chandeliers,” or exceptional hanging displays of pork products, including superb house-made pancetta and sopressata.
All this shopping makes you hungry, so I was happy to round off my morning spree with lunch at famed Arthur Avenue eatery Pasquale’s Rigoletto. With its splendidly dressed tables and slightly kitschy murals so quintessentially of their age they should have a preservation order slapped on them if they don’t already have one Rigoletto is a charming throwback to another time. With platters of antipasti piled high, classic pasta dishes in generous portions, an old-fashioned sole with almonds or pollo alla Scarpiello this restaurant is the antithesis of “hip” and “edgy” and that, frankly, is its appeal. Come on a Friday or Saturday night and you will hear a 1950s-style lounge-singer crooning his way through the Great American Songbook, with generous dollops of “Besame” and “O Sole Mio.”
Photographs by Jeremy Wayne.
Back at the Arthur Street Retail Market, I stopped by the Bronx Beer Hall. I wanted to make good on an earlier promise I’d made to the Beer Hall’s affable owners, Paul and Anthony Ramirez, to return after lunch for a Little Italy Italian Pilsner, brewed, it goes without saying, in the Bronx.
As Belmont becomes less recognizably Italian, that beer seemed nicely to bridge the gap between the old Italian world and the new Latino one. Just come see the wonderful old one before it’s too late.
For more, visit arthuravenue.com, delillopastryshop.com; borgattis.com; calabriapork.com, pasqualesrigoletto.com; thebronxbeerhall.com
