Serving pizza and pasta to diners while singing in an Italian restaurant is not part of the typical career path for future music legends. But Tony Bennett isn’t a typical music legend and neither was the start of his career. Indeed, long before he became the world’s most famous nonagenarian vocal star — and even before he made his first record in 1950 — the singer born Anthony Dominick Benedetto cut his teeth as a singing waiter in his Queens, N.Y., hometown of Astoria.

It’s a time he recalls with great relish — or, to be more precise, like a moon hitting him in the eye like a big pizza pie. “I loved that time of my life, and I honestly feel that, if I hadn’t made it professionally, I would be perfectly happy going back to being a singing waiter,” said Bennett, who now lives in a Manhattan apartment within a stone’s throw or two of Central Park.