by Nicki P. Wood

As a tourist destination, the past is just fantastic. One past setting I love to visit is New York in the '40s and '50s, when the Irish bars were full of Irish, and Italian restaurants were owned by Italian-speakers, with mamma or nonna running the kitchen.

Mammas and nonnas are in somewhat shorter supply here in modern-day Middle Tennessee, where our Italian food was long limited to red-sauce spaghetti, piccata and pizza. My first experience with fine American-Italian was during a 1990 trip to New York's La Lanterna — not a famous place, but that's the point.

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Source: http://www.nashvillescene.com/