Arthur Avenue Food Tours

Arthur Avenue Food Tours Take the tour on your own with our app ($9.99. Narrated and guided by Arthur Avenue Food Tours's founders, Danielle Oteri and Christian Galliani.

If you’ve ever dreamed of meandering around Arthur Avenue’s historic markets and stores, snacking and shopping, stocking your pantry like an Italian nonna and gathering ingredients for a big Sunday supper, this is the tour for you. Chicken parm and Bronx tales, first-pressed olive oil and hand-pulled mozzarella, bubbly Neapolitan pizza and fresh pasta cut to order, coal oven-baked loaves and barre

ls full of briny olives, it’s all on Arthur Avenue. Danielle Oteri is a food writer and art historian whose family’s Arthur Avenue shop opened in 1918, the Shopping & Tasting tour draws on 102 years of history and community. Christian is an award-winning sommelier and an Italian wine expert. Or take a guided tour with an expert host. This tour visits 10 historic food shops to meet the shopkeepers and find out what’s best in each shop. Along the way you’ll enjoy a cheese tasting, pizza al taglio, and a fresh-filled cannoli.

To all our friends cooking, building, cleaning, making, mixing, lifting and fixing we see you and appreciate you! ...
09/02/2026

To all our friends cooking, building, cleaning, making, mixing, lifting and fixing we see you and appreciate you!

There’s a word for what’s happening to New York City right now: same-ification. The same coffee kiosks, the same viral d...
07/27/2026

There’s a word for what’s happening to New York City right now: same-ification. The same coffee kiosks, the same viral dessert lines, the same cafes where everyone is on a laptop. Polished branding that looks identical from Williamsburg to the Upper East Side.

Arthur Avenue has been immune to all of it. The family at Cerini Coffee still sits with you to figure out your perfect roast. Madonia Brothers still makes prosciutto bread the same way they did a century ago. Teitel Brothers, importing the finest Italian products since 1915, is still the same family in the same shop. Artuso Pastry has been making desserts people actually come back for since 1946.

You can experience it all on the Shopping & Tasting Tour. It runs every Saturday from 11am - 1:30 and includes a dozen shops for shopping and small bites plus a sit-down lunch at Mario’s, open since 1918. You’ll hear the stories, find out who does what best, and know exactly what you’re going to buy the next time you visit this absolute gem of a neighborhood.

“There’s nothing there anymore.”Every Italian American has heard this. It wasn’t the whole truth.When your grandmother s...
07/13/2026

“There’s nothing there anymore.”

Every Italian American has heard this. It wasn’t the whole truth.

When your grandmother said she was from Naples or Palermo or Avellino, she most likely meant the “Provincia di” — the province. The actual place was a village her family had lived in and loved for centuries.

People didn’t leave because they wanted to. By the late 1800s, so many men had already gone abroad to work that entire villages were hollowed out. My grandmother’s father sent her to live with her sister on Arthur Avenue. Not because America was calling, but because everyone was leaving.

Going from an isolated mountain village to New York City was a profound shock. Arthur Avenue was a comfort because it replicated something familiar.

Today, Arthur Avenue is a first point of contact for people tracing their Italian immigration story. The next stop is Italy, because those villages are still there. The beautiful churches, the medieval streets, and old palazzi. Some nearly abandoned, some revitalized, all with a story. Your story!

Where did your family actually come from? Not the city. The village. Tell me in the comments.

Nobody eats like the early Italian immigrants anymore. And they should.Escarole and beans. Baccalà and potatoes. Frisell...
06/27/2026

Nobody eats like the early Italian immigrants anymore. And they should.

Escarole and beans. Baccalà and potatoes. Friselle with tomatoes and olive oil. Meat was scarce. Sweets were for special occasions. This was everyday food — humble, seasonal, and extraordinarily good.

When the Arthur Avenue Retail Market opened in 1939, 90% of the pushcarts inside sold vegetables.

My family ran a baccalà store on this street. After World War II, prosperity hit fast, and we transformed into a butcher shop. A whole store that sold nothing but baccalà became a memory.

But not everything disappeared. Addeo’s still makes friselle. The fish markets still sell baccalà. Escarole and beans never left.

You can read about this history anywhere, but you can only taste it here.

🔗 arthuravenuefoodtours.com

The real story is always more interesting.
06/19/2026

The real story is always more interesting.

The neighborhood didn’t survive on nostalgia. It survived on skill.Three butchers, all master-level, custom cut to order...
06/15/2026

The neighborhood didn’t survive on nostalgia. It survived on skill.

Three butchers, all master-level, custom cut to order — for less than the shrink-wrapped version at a regular grocery store.

Three bakeries that have baked bread on premises for over 100 years. The walls have wild yeast in them now. Same recipe, different building, different bread.

Six places make fresh mozzarella by hand — not machine-formed, which is what you get even at the “good” grocery store.

The salumi is cured right in the shop, the way it’s always been done.

Eat the cannoli, and the cookies, and the sandwiches. But the shopping is the real story.

The United States turns 250 this year. Italy became a nation in 1861.The first Sicilians arrived in 1866 — landing in Ne...
06/09/2026

The United States turns 250 this year. Italy became a nation in 1861.

The first Sicilians arrived in 1866 — landing in New Orleans as a labor replacement for enslaved people. Italy was five years old. They felt Sicilian.

In American cities people clustered by region, sometimes by village. Marrying someone from a different part of Italy was a real crossing. Over generations, an Italian identity emerged that hadn’t existed before.

The food followed the same arc. Neapolitan, Sicilian, Calabrese cuisines began merging into something called “Italian” food first in immigrant neighborhoods abroad. A national Italian cuisine came later — postwar, when Italy was rebuilding as a modern nation. Carbonara and tiramisu were born of modern, postwar Italy.

Everything you think you know about Italian American immigration is wrong.The names weren’t changed at Ellis Island. Mor...
06/04/2026

Everything you think you know about Italian American immigration is wrong.
The names weren’t changed at Ellis Island. More Italians went back to Italy than stayed. And they didn’t stop speaking Italian — they never spoke it in the first place.

The real story is more interesting.

Swipe through.

Everything you know about Arthur Avenue is wrong.The street wasn’t named after Chester Allen Arthur. The land wasn’t don...
06/01/2026

Everything you know about Arthur Avenue is wrong.

The street wasn’t named after Chester Allen Arthur. The land wasn’t donated by a Gilded Age heiress. And that table overflowing with enormous meatballs? That happened across the US after WWII.

Swipe through, then come see it for yourself.

Why the Gladiator music? Because carbonara comes from Rome! Making authentic carbonara is actually pretty easy, but you ...
05/27/2026

Why the Gladiator music? Because carbonara comes from Rome! Making authentic carbonara is actually pretty easy, but you need very fresh eggs because they will only be cooked by the heat of the pasta. (Anything more and it turns into scrambled eggs.) So do yourself a favor and go to Biancardi‘s and get these beauties from a lovely farm on the New York Vermont border. This is the kind of stuff you will never find in a chain grocery store or market. Stuff of this quality only comes from real people who know other real people. 🍝

Address

2344 Arthur Avenue
The Bronx, NY
10458

Opening Hours

Tuesday 9am - 6pm
Wednesday 9am - 6pm
Thursday 9am - 6pm
Friday 9am - 6pm
Saturday 9am - 6pm

Telephone

+17186186264

Website

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