Have you ever wondered how the world ended up with so many "Italian" restaurants with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths and a spaghetti and meatballs special when that snapshot simply doesn't exist in Italy? Then this is the book for you.

Alternatively, even if you've never really thought about that question before but are now interested in the answer, I also recommend this book for you.

In How Italian Food Conquered the World, Esquire magazine food and wine critic John Mariani takes us from Ven More...

I went into this book expecting the brief history of Italian cooking in Italy and the proliferation in various forms throughout the world. Although a large part of the book dealt with the immigrant struggle and creation of "Italian-American" food, there did not appear to be a clear argument to tie the entire book together.

I've never been a huge fan of Italian food. It was always too heavy with too many carbs, too much fat an too much of that ever present red sauce. Obviously, my first exposure t More...

I enjoyed reading this book quite immensely. I learned so much about the history of Italian food in Italy and around the world--so many fun facts. The one thing I just don't understand is why Mariani completely left out the influence Italians had on coffee and "café society." As a young person growing up in California in the 1970s and 80s, I took for granted being able to have a cappuccino and a delicious pastry in a charming cafe in San Francisco, but the most of the rest of the country wasn't More...

I found this book fascinating. Maybe it is because I have a deep love of Italian food and over the past few years have read extensively on the Italian cuisine, the Italian-American cuisine and the various cuisines of the Mediterranean but I was amazed at the depth of information contained in this book. While at times I found myself scanning the pages because of the level of detail, I still continued on with it because of the numerous anecdotal and historical information about various dishes and More...

As an Italian-American, I was looking for a book that would teach me virtually everything there was to know about the history of Italian food. This was that book! From the beginning I was sucked into the world of Italy as seen through the eyes of both Italians and Americans. I learned a ton, it wasn't the dry type of read that one might associate with histrionic reads.

This book not only taught me a great deal, but it also left me salivating. I was in Puerto Rico when I read this book, and the f More...

Having read a couple books about Chinese food, including Jennifer 8 Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, I thought this would be an interesting read - especially since I'm mostly Italian.

I wasn't real impressed, though. Much of the book is a history of Italian and Italian-inspired restaurants, mostly in NY, Milan, and the like. There is all of about 2 sentences about, say, The Olive Garden, where I suspect a lot more people have eaten, and think of when they think of Italian food.

There are also More...

I might have given this 2 and a half stars if it did not tick me off so much. Basically, this is not a book but a catalog of restaurants, wines, chefs (all Italian of course) that came together to raise the standard of Italian cooking in the United States and if it were not for the tantalizing tidbit here (when FedEx started shipping Europe to US in the 80's suddenly we could get fresh, good Italian staples)and there (Giada DeLaurentis posed in pool of tomato sauce {!?})and some recognition of t More...

this was absolutely a waste of time and money. I have never been so bored or so utterly confounded by a person's reason for writing an historical litany of restaurants and restauranteurs he has known, unless he's deluded by personal arrogance and/or importance. Good grief, I threw the book...and my book club was unanimous in loathing it! Being a writer, it is VERY hard for me to not be sympathetic to other writers. This is a first. Wow, what a ripoff.

Thus far I'm not terribly impressed. If he is a well known food critic, personally I've never heard of him, I would expect him to be able to write better than he does. Frankly I've found the book to be pretentious and annoying so far. I'm really glad I got this book for free, I wouldn't pay a dollar for it.

The book doesn't get better, the author's pretensions shine through from page to page and make it a tough read. The only good thing about the book is the recipes he includes.

An interesting topic but not particularly insightful. Much of the book was written as a series of unrelated events: "This restaurant owner did this and then that grower did that and then this merchant did the other thing" with no real unifying presence or theme. The book also jumped back and forth across regions and eras. Also, it's really more about how Italian-American food conquered the US, not about how Italian food conquered the world.

There is a fundamental problem with this book: Italian food didn't conquer the world. French food did. This book admits as much, spending as much time talking about French cuisine and techniques as it does Italian.

Also, the author is a New York-based critic who thinks the entire world revolves around New York. This quickly becomes tiresome.

This book was just okay. I was expecting it to be much more interesting than it was. He went into tons of detail about restaurants I had never heard of or been to. I generally like food writing, but this was just too much. I liked a few of the chapters, like the one about Slow food, but much of this book wasn't very interesting to me.

I read this book because a) I am Italian American b) I am a student of history c)I am a foodie.
I loved this book. It will not disappoint. Oh, and there are recipes included. This book will add to the growing body of scholarly books on culinary topics; scholarly is seldom this much fun!

Disjointed and lacking a thesis beyond "lots of people like Italian food". The beginning is totally repetitive, and the locales are almost entirely NY, Milan with a little LA thrown in (I suppose so he could talk about Wolfgang Puck's pizza revolution).
Nice idea, lousy execution.

A nice easy read that covers some of the recent and not so recent history of Italians' impact on the ever changing culinary scene. I didn't ready anything that added to my understanding of the subject but it did get me thinking about my own family's influence on the world of Italian-American Cooking. Were they really rhe group that set the standard? How much did they bring from the old country and how much was new? Sounds like a topic for a socialogy thesis.

This could have been an interesting book. But if it jells into a coherent point of view it doesn't happen in the first half of the book. I'll never know about the second half, because Mariani's writing style is so deadly boring that I threw in the towel before that.

Having slogged through "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles" (I think that was the title), ethnic foods as cultural history and personal catharsis is done for me. I tried reading this one. Got through the first chapter.

What was I expecting: A non-fiction, literary narrative with more storytelling.
What I got: Formulaic high school/freshman comp research paper.

The thesis is unclear. I believe that the basis for this book is that the proliferation of Italian immigrants in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries brought about changes in how people ate. Rather than developing true Italian replicas (of course, a unified Italy does not occur until 1871), a bastardization of the cuisine. Unfortunately, th More...

not uninteresting, but not what I thought it would be. Goes more into restaurants than the foods -- TACO USA did a better balance of the two. I have a better understanding of Italian regional foods, Italian-American and a list of restaurant I want to try.

I had fairly high hopes for this book. I found the first half to be very interesting but after the halfway point I completely lost interest as the focus turned to celebrity chefs and the fashion world. While I appreciate how those areas affect restaurants and food culture in general I didn't find it very interesting to read about in this context. I would have liked to read more about current wines or food trends, for example, and how Italy is impacted by and is impacting the rest of the food wor More...

Heard this author being interviewed on NPR. Loved the interview...book was okay.

I was expecting a social history, but the book actually focuses much more on a century's worth of Italian restaurants, mostly of the pricey and pretentious variety. And as someone who loves her Italian-American grandmother's cooking, I wasn't won over by the author's frequent assertions that Italian food in gourmet restaurants is inherently superior to the traditional Italian-American dishes that have become American staples.

Pasta, wine, Italian history--of course I'm biased!

A fun history of Italian food and wine both in America and Italy. Was pleasantly surprised to find a few recipes along the way too.

Disjointed and lacking a thesis beyond "lots of people like Italian food". The beginning is totally repetitive, and the locales are almost entirely NY, Milan with a little LA thrown in (I suppose so he could talk about Wolfgang Puck's pizza revolution).
Nice idea, lousy execution.

Interesting if you're a fan of food news, but more about restaurant industry than anything else.

An interesting account on where the "Italian" food we eat today came from. Who would have known that Chef Boyardee and Hamburger Helper were based off of Italian food? Many interesting historical stories throughout the book

Interesting but got a bit academic at times and at other times simply listing people or restaurants for example involved in a certain aspect. But many interesting things to read about particularly the first half of the book.

Makes me hungry every time! Hmm.... been making a lot of Italian lately!

Mildly interesting. The story could be told in half the time.