Arthur Avenue Food Tours

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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 barrels 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.

We often start the Italian-American story at Ellis Island. But our ancestors arrived with centuries of history already s...
09/23/2026

We often start the Italian-American story at Ellis Island. But our ancestors arrived with centuries of history already shaping how they saw family, community, loyalty, and people from the next town over.

The system varied across Italy—mezzadria in Tuscany, latifondo in Sicily, feudal landholding in places like Irpinia—but local loyalties and hierarchies shaped everyday life long before Italy became a nation.

We inherited some of those ways of seeing the world. Understanding that history helps us understand ourselves.

That’s what we’ll explore in Finding Your Way Back to Italy, my online class on October 8.
7–8:30 PM ET • See bio for the link to register.

You’ve probably heard that your family’s name was changed at Ellis Island.It wasn’t.The passenger lists were made before...
09/22/2026

You’ve probably heard that your family’s name was changed at Ellis Island.
It wasn’t.

The passenger lists were made before the ships left Italy, so if your great-grandfather’s name changed, it happened somewhere else.

And that’s actually a good place to start thinking about Italian-American history.

Our ancestors didn’t leave a country called “Italy” as we tend to imagine it today. They came from specific villages and cities, spoke different dialects, and had regional traditions and histories that could differ greatly from one another. Once they arrived in America, people from the same villages and regions often found one another again and built communities here.

They were Abruzzese, Calabrese, Sicilian, and Neapolitan.

The Italian identity many of us inherited was shaped in America by all these different regional identities.

So if you’re curious about where your family came from, “Italy” is only the beginning. The interesting part is figuring out which Italy.

That’s what I’ll be talking about in Finding Your Way Back to Italy, an online class for you to start figuring it out.

I’ll be teaching the class myself. I’m an art historian, an expert on the history of Southern Italy, and the founder of Arthur Avenue Food Tours. I spent 16 years at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and my writing about Italy has appeared in The Paris Review, The Independent, Condé Nast Traveler, and the BBC.

We’ll talk about Italian immigration, the places people actually came from, and how to start putting your own family story back into its historical context.

Finding Your Way Back to Italy
Online • October 8th from 7-8:30 PM ET • SEE BIO FOR THE LINK TO REGISTER

I have been searching for this photo for years, I thought it was lost and yesterday a long lost relative gave it to me. ...
09/18/2026

I have been searching for this photo for years, I thought it was lost and yesterday a long lost relative gave it to me. This is Grazia, my great-grandmother who ran the first Oteri family business at 2374 Arthur Avenue. First it was a baccala shop. After World War II, it became a butcher shop. It continues as a butcher shop today which you know and love as Vincent’s Meat Market. Look at the beautiful wood carving on the storefront. Also look at those shoes she’s wearing and imagine standing on your feet all day in those while you serve your customers then going upstairs to cook and clean for your six kids. Are there Avenue is so much more than sandwiches and rainbow cookies. New York City history and Italian American history is so accessible here and it’s important for us to share that with you on one of our tours.

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.

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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