‘That’s amore’ — and it’s also economics

Ralph Conte is a Cranston man, born and raised. John Mariani is a New York boy from the Bronx. Both remember sitting down to Sunday dinners featuring the platters of food that are the cornerstone of Italian-American cooking.

Conte’s family is from a little town outside Naples, in the Campania region. But he says he grew up on “exactly” the dishes Mariani has in his cookbook. “A lot of vegetables,” says Conte. “Meat was very rare because of money.”

At 12, Conte started washing dishes in restaurants. He attended Johnson & Wales University in Providence, but on June 17, 1978, his life changed. He had a motorcycle accident that was so severe it mangled his right arm. At 20 years old, he was told he would never cook again.

Conte didn’t accept it. After a stint cooped up in the hospital squeezing tennis balls for physical therapy, he decided to try his own method of recovery: he headed to a friend’s restaurant in Miami Beach to cook one-handed by night and bask in “youth and life” on the beach by day. Soon after, he headed to Italy, where he cooked his way through restaurants on the outskirts of Florence and around Naples. (Eventually, his own form of physical therapy, coupled with a series of surgeries, would restore about 70 percent of his right arm’s function.)

He returned to the United States a year later, in 1979, and opened his first restaurant, a 30-seater in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. Shortly after, the mayor of Providence, Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, approached Conte about opening a restaurant there. Conte obliged, and in 1984 opened Raphael Bar-Risto. He moved its location within Providence twice before ending up at One Union Station, where the cosmopolitan restaurant currently seats 100.

John Mariani’s family also hails from Campania. His maternal great-grandmother came from a town just south of Naples. His father’s father was from a small east-coast fishing village, Vasto, in Abruzzo. He recalls going to his aunt’s house for Sunday supper; there was always pasta, his mother’s homemade gnocchi, and the usual breadsticks wrapped in prosciutto. And there would always be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding or a roast chicken as well. “Somewhere along the line she got a recipe for Yorkshire pudding,” Mariani says. His ties to Italian food are passionate. He travels to Italy twice a year and in 1998 published The Dictionary of Italian Food and Drink (Broadway Books).

But when Mariani was asked by Harvard Common Press publisher Bruce Shaw to write The Italian-American Cookbook, he hesitated. Wasn’t there so much on Italian food already? What more could be said about it? And then he realized that bookstore shelves might be overflowing with Italian cookbooks, but there was nothing that explained the oversize portions one gets at Vinny Testa’s or how spaghetti and meatballs found its way onto nearly every American diner menu. “Nobody really treated it as 100 years of Italian food culture, which has changed radically since World War II, and changed radically with the availability of new ingredients,” says Mariani. “We never had extra-virgin olive oil. You could never get fresh halibut. You never saw polenta, and look at these wines!” He gestures to a table where slim bottles of Brezza Barolo and Barbera d’Alba are lined up like soldiers. “These wines were never available 15 or 20 years ago!”

In essence, says Mariani, Italian-American cuisine came from the hearts of those who left their country because they were poor, and wanted to find the riches of the new land. For example, “pizza was a food enjoyed exclusively by the poor people of Naples, who folded over the dough and ate it as a kind of sandwich,” he writes.

Mariani and Conte might never have broken crostini together had their families remained in their ancestral homeland. But tonight, in Conte’s small kitchen, they work together. Their mission is to reintroduce guests to what they think of as Italian food, but which is truly Italian-American.