New York City, my birthplace, is ringed by Italian neighborhoods. Go to Staten Island, to the Bronx, to Long Island or to New Jersey -- it doesn’t really matter where you go, as long as you are within 50 miles of the Empire State Building. Within that fortunate circle, you will find that you are always reasonably close to a neighborhood, or at least a street, full of little stores and restaurants of unprepossessing appearance and fantastic culinary achievement. Tragically, such neighborhoods are a blessing of erratic and patently unfair geographic distribution.

In the rest of the country the quality of the prosciutto seems to be directly proportional to the number of hand-crafted teak display cases, and also to the elevation of your heart rate when you view the prices posted inside those cases. In Italian neighborhoods, by contrast, the older and more scuffed the linoleum, the barer the badly plastered walls, the more tattered the appearance of the single 1956 Mass card taped into the cash register by way of decoration, the more likely you are to discover the single best piece of charcuterie you have ever eaten.