Foreword: One of the tenets of Digest is, ‘don’t blow up the spot.’ A tenet which we must adhere to in the following article. After some reflection, we have realized, naming certain people and establishments, even in a positive light, could be damaging to their businesses and reputations. Therefore, in the spirit of Digest and journalistic integrity, a lot of the particulars will have to remain vague and/or anonymous.

– The Digest Editorial Staff

A friend of mine was working on Shaft 17B out in Queens for the DEP. When it’s complete, the 700-foot rebar-reinforced cement shaft will guide the upstate reservoirs’ drinking water straight under the terminal moraine of Long Island, circumventing Manhattan for the first time in history. A major, years-long, city-funded construction site will always attract a certain type of Italian-American.

“This guy, who operates one of the backhoes on the site, says Park Side is good.”

I asked, “You trust his food recs?”

“He eats sausage and peppers every day for lunch.”

I was excited to go out to Corona and dine at Park Side restaurant, not so much for the food, but for its notorious reputation. The owner, Tony, AKA ‘Tony Park Side’ AKA ‘Tough Tony’ Federici, has a long, albeit unproven, history as a member of the Genovese crime family.

Park Side, written in gold font, on a forest-green awning that wraps around an entire corner of a small tree-lined park a couple blocks from Flushing Meadows. The restaurant stands out of place in the overwhelmingly first-generation Latin American neighborhood, just as much as it stands out of time. Formally dressed valets wait on the curb, offering a hand to women stepping out of Porsche Cayennes and Cadillac Escalades. The light wood-lined walls and lantern lighting give the interior of the restaurant the feel of a beloved steakhouse in a midwestern town — somewhere hundred of miles away from places that cater to patrons who have vague, elitist creative-class jobs like ‘Product Designer’ and ‘Artistic Director’.

Tattoos that read ‘omerta’ and ‘italian-pride’ nestled on thick necks and meaty forearms of some of the Park Side patrons, who, with a wave to the maître d', wandered into the rabbit warren of hidden and private dining rooms towards the back of the restaurant; one could easily jump to certain conclusions about Mr. Federici’s Italian restaurant.

From the tabloid rise of Al Capone in the 1930s to the Sopranos, the American public has had a century-long cultural obsession with Italian organized crime. And like all obsessions, it can be hard to parse out what is truth from what is objectification.

A focal point of our obsession with the Mafia is their food. The association is certainly a hallmark of the Mafia stereotype. When we think of the Mafia, we recall Tony Soprano hulking over a fridge in his culdesac in North Caldwell, double fisting cold cuts in his meaty mitts, and Al Pacino popping McCluskey and Solozzo at point-blank range over their plates of pasta in The Godfather. And I am not immune to this obsession, nor the stereotypes. My imagination ran rampant when I went to Park Side; wondering whether, feet from where I ate my veal scallopini, someone was being made an offer they could not refuse.

I left Park Side that night curious to know more about mob restaurants. Were all the others like this one? Do they have to care about the non-mob-connected customers? Does the food have to be good if the restaurant is a money-laundering front?

My only brush with mob restaurants prior to this article was second-hand. In the early nineties, my grandfather, Antonio, helped his friend, also named Antonio, out of a jam. Antonio’s Italian restaurant, which sat on the corner of Kane and Court street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, was being besieged by the mob.

The way my grandfather told it, a guy came to Antonio’s restaurant one day and demanded he have his tablecloths and napkins laundered at a certain place, source all his glassware from another place, and his cutlery from another. These mob-operated restaurant suppliers cut every corner: late deliveries, half-fulfilled orders — Antonio’s business was being bled dry. My grandfather, with the help of a group of other neighborhood patrons, ordinary professionals who lived in the area and loved Antonio’s restaurant, helped him move his restaurant out of the clutches of the mob, deep into the tony part of Brooklyn Heights where it remains today. In 2019, New York Times food journalist Mark Bittman, fawned over Antonio’s restaurant, Noodle Pudding, calling it a ‘beloved neighborhood spot.’

This story was told in my Brooklyn-Italian household as a lesson; the mob getting their hooks into a restaurant is a fate that befalls a business, like black mold or a rat infestation. There was a tacit understanding that the food at a mobbed-up restaurant wasn’t good and was frequented by boorish people.

However, New York City is dotted with places that yearn for a seedier reputation, masquerading as ‘mafia’ restaurants. Bamonte’s, in the effete part of Williamsburg, borders on clownish — one almost expects an accordion player to crawl out from under the white tablecloth. But that’s what customers have come to expect; it both piques our voyeurism and tugs at our nostalgia, which is excellent for an actual criminal operating in 2023, because the hoi polloi are busy searching for the wrong clues.

According to a 2018 Financial Times article, the Italian Mafia is omnipresent in the import and export of Italian food. From the racketeering and extortion of olive oil, wine, specialty cheeses, and even Tony Soprano’s beloved cured meat — the Mafia in Italy made 22 billion euros off of agribusiness in 2017 alone. Why sell black tar heroin when you can sell gallons of extra virgin to an Eataly purveyor at a 2000% markup?

But the Italian Mafia and the Italian-American Mafia are not one in the same. Especially at Park Side, where the house wine is sweet, the meatballs fist-sized, and every type of parmigiana under the sun is on the menu: eggplant, chicken, veal, shrimp.

“When talking about this subject, everybody wants to put something in a box. But these guys are all individuals, they are not totemic or monolithic,” Jerry Capeci told me over the phone.

I called in a favor from a gal, who knew a guy, who knew a guy, who led me to Jerry Capeci. A week or so after I tried to make contact, I got a call from a blocked number.

“Hello. This is Jerry Capeci. I am driving from one location to another. I should arrive at my destination in about twenty minutes. Until then, we can talk.”

Jerry was, at first, understandably reticent. He is considered one of the foremost experts on the Italian-American crime families in the New York area. Jerry Capeci runs a subscription website called 'GangLand News’, which is the tip of the spear on the current comings and goings of Italian-American organized crime in and around the five boroughs. Every newspaper in New York, from the Times to the Post, has published articles from Capeci on the topic. He even played himself on the Sopranos.

But when I told him I was doing a story for an eating magazine, and I just wanted to talk about food, the conversation opened up.

“I don’t know if mob food is better or worse. But I know it can be as good as any Italian fine dining in New York City. They shift tastes, to be sure, depending on the area and clientele. But the restaurant is not useful if it’s not successful.”

Let’s face it; I am many things, but a millennial Donnie Brasco I am not. I do not have the free time nor the resources nor a kevlar vest to skulk around warehouses at the port of Newark to see first-hand if the freshest provolone shipments coming in from Calabria are being sent to certain establishments at marked up prices, or sit at a bar for hours, twiddling bucatini, trying to overhear a back room deal being struck. But what I could do is experience these restaurants, merely as an eater, which Jerry Capeci, a fellow Brooklyn-Italian and lover of Italian food, could appreciate.

I asked Jerry Capeci if he knew of active mob restaurants in the five boroughs and he rattled off a few names. One in Bay Ridge. Two in Staten Island. All three were very, very far from Mulberry Street, “As the Italian American community has moved out to the suburbs, so have the mobsters.”

When I pressed Jerry Capeci on how a mob restaurant functions in the present day, the truth does not stray too far from fiction.

“Wise guys use so-called mob restaurants for two different reasons. One reason is to enjoy a meal with their families, wives, and girlfriends. And there is, of course, the other reason, to have clandestine meetings without worrying about being interrupted or overheard. Both of these kinds of restaurants exist in New York City and they are sometimes one and the same. And at these restaurants you will see a prevalence of one brand or one company being used over and over again.”

A hurdle to eating at these restaurants was the plausible deniability. It’s odd for a single man to dine alone, especially at a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant in a residential area deep in an outer borough. I wasn’t necessarily going undercover, but I didn’t want to attract attention.

For this article, I sampled five restaurants in four boroughs. Over the course of that time I learned I can be pretty discreet. Most of my dinner guests, however, could not.

“I ordered the carbonah,” my friend Michael said, his confused expression matching the waiter’s.

“The what?” The waiter asked in an Italian accent.

“Carbonah. The carbonah,” Michael continued.

“The carbonara,” I interjected, in breathless desperation to resolve the situation and also to get Michael to stop saying ‘carbonah’, “He ordered carbonara.”

We were eating in a restaurant on Arthur Avenue. This restaurant was not among Jerry Capeci’s picks, but the former Daily News crime reporter, Noah Goldberg, in a brief conversation over the phone, mentioned this establishment was infamous for hosting a mafia-themed private event a couple of years back. The guest list, which the FBI got their hands on, included Dons from crime families up and down the Eastern seaboard.

Maybe, because of the unwanted FBI attention, the restaurant was totally empty, aside from a few men speaking in Italian by the bar. One of the men sported an Elvis-adjacent bouffant hairdo. It was a cold night, bitter rain pelted empty streets of Bronx’s Little Italy. With a flick of the wrist, anyone could have closed the blinds, and whatever transpired inside the restaurant would remain a total mystery to the outside world.

An old Italian waiter slowly got up from the bar and took our order. We ordered platters of food, a pile of fried calamari, a brick of eggplant parmigiana, a stack of mozzarella in carrozza, and a big bowl of fettuccine bolognese.

But when it all came, my friend, Michael, was missing his pasta, “I just want to make sure it’s not still coming. This is a lot of food.”

Michael stretched out his arm, high in the air, and waved across the banquet hall as if the Italian waiter and Michael were old friends, meeting up to catch a train in the crowded Main Concourse of Grand Central Station.

“No. You did not order the carbonara. That is too much food.”

Michael tried to walk it back, “That is okay–”

“No!” The waiter insisted. “I will bring you the carbonara.”

Fifteen minutes later, the waiter returned holding a platter of cream soaked pasta, thick pieces of bacon generously interlaced between the spaghetti. He heaved the platter in front of Michael.

“Here. Here is your carbonara.”

As the waiter walked away, I whispered to Michael, “I don’t care how full you are. We have to eat that entire plate of pasta.”

I wanted to try one of Jerry Capeci’s recommendations, a restaurant deep, deep into Staten Island. They had a Sunday lunch special, which in Italy is the most important meal of the week and meant to be enjoyed with family, so I invited my sister.

“Where is the Staten Island Ferry?”

“The southern tip of Manhattan.”

“So like, TriBeCa?”

My sister, Alessandra, is the kind of Brooklynite that people from other boroughs make fun of. I tried to convey to my sister that for a Sunday lunch in an old school Italian restaurant, she should dress like we were coming from a conservative church service. Alessandra arrived at the ferry terminal sporting a long quilted, bright red coat, black Harley Davidson biker boots, white cargo pants, a chartreuse and turquoise striped silk buttoned-down shirt under a brown, boiled knit vest, and a large choker that was bejeweled with what looked like a piece of moldy jade. She dressed less like a conservative church congregant and more like the embodiment of a conservative priest’s sermon about pronoun-stealing demons.

The restaurant was located in a strip mall in the upscale neighborhood of Todt Hill, where four years before, Frank Cali, the boss of the Gambino family, was shot dead in his driveway. This restaurant was a little more overt than Park Side: big frescoes of the Amalfi coast and Cinque Terre were depicted on each of the walls, illuminated by ornate chandeliers.

The owner, in a three piece suit and dress shirt unbuttoned to the sternum with a matching pocket square, clocked us almost immediately, “hello-howareya, what brings youse to our restaurant today?”

It was a valid question. We looked less like siblings and more like a Mormon missionary had decided to try and convert a pansexual crust punk over a plate of pasta.

I lied. “We grew up near here, but now we live in Brooklyn. We came here as kids and I thought it would be nice to have a Sunday lunch with my sister like old times.”

My sister was appalled at my bald-faced lies, but he seemed to buy it. When it was time for dessert, he sent over complimentary limoncello to our table.

I must confess, I had an ulterior motive for bringing Alessandra; she is a chef, who has worked at Michelin starred restaurants in the chicest parts of New York. Through her eyes she corroborated a couple elements that all five of these mob restaurants shared. The food ranges in quality, usually from middling, standard ‘red sauce’ style Italian-American food, to more upscale Italian-Italian seasonal dishes. For instance, this place served an excellent seasonal stuffed artichoke dish in a Neapolitan style.

But what stood out was the service. Our Sunday lunch of three courses, dessert, and a bottle of wine came to a little less than $100 a person even after a generous tip. And from the moment we entered the restaurant, till the moment we left, the service was constant, attentive, and impeccable. Sonnet-length lists of specials were recited. Napkins placed on laps. Waiters swanned and swooned around the dining rooms. The table was swept for crumbs after each course. A towering dessert cart was brought round; not to mention the complimentary after-dinner drink that came with it. This level of impeccable service was the norm across all five restaurants I sampled, with the exclusion of our old Italian waiter in the Bronx.

At places where my sister has cheffed, the service is usually a terse twenty-five year old, somehow making it your problem that they got a liberal arts degree in Anthropology, who spends their non-working hours making video art in a basement in Ridgewood. And when the check eventually comes, the bill is twice the price for half the food.

Traditional Italian, and Italian-American cuisine, in a formal setting will attract customers of a certain caliber. Although the nature of the criminality changes to adapt with the times, the Italian-American Mafia is now an old tradition, spanning well over a century, and passed down through generations of a chosen family. And maybe, these older diners seek refuge from the hubbub of the present, in a familiar setting – restaurants owned by men who respect tradition – where they can get a plate of pasta the way their nonna made it. The vast majority of the diners in these establishments were older. And so are the wiseguys who own these establishments. In November of last year, Tough Tony Federici passed away at the age of 82. Jerry Capeci wrote an obituary on Gangland News.

In the obituary, Jerry noted that Park Side wasn’t just a front for Federici, but a profession: “He wasn't a silent partner, FBI agents of yesteryear noted incredulously in a summary of a report they wrote about him 22 years ago: ‘Tough Tony owns the (Park Side) restaurant and he really works there.’“

Over the phone, Jerry recalled the obituary, “Federici, he loved being a restaurateur. It was his thing, maybe even more so than his other alleged activities.”

Out of the five restaurants I went to, there is only one I would really recommend — the Bay Ridge mob restaurant Jerry Capeci recommended. I went out on a Friday night, the night traditionally reserved for ‘girlfriends’, so I took my partner. She dressed discreetly, with a black turtleneck and some flashier jewelry, just a slight nod to Carmela Soprano, and did not mention anything about Italian-American criminality over dinner.

I will not say what the restaurant is called. All I will say is that it is all the way at the very end of Bay Ridge, just as the belly of South Brooklyn curves into Fort Hamilton. It was a little hipper than the other restaurants I visited for this article, a simple color scheme with blue LED lighting gave it the feel of an Italian nightclub. Young waiters spoke to each other in Neapolitan dialect. Right in front, a group of men in their thirties, with big gold crosses laid out over their bulging chest muscles, dined with women wearing cocktail dresses, silicon and botox shoving against every inch of visible skin.

The food was fantastic, seasonal, and authentic. I had a plate of perfectly al dente cavatelli with a simple light tomato sauce scantily covering the dish, which somehow complimented tender tiny broccoli florets and shaved ricotta salata on top. The wine list was extensive, superb, and astoundingly priced — just $50 for a bottle of 2015 amarone valpolicella.

In recent years, Bay Ridge has started to shift from a conservative Italian-American bastion to a residential neighborhood for everyone. Three generations of an East Asian family were enjoying a meal in the corner. Two tables over, a young Black couple were on a date. And when I went to the bathroom, deep in the basement, I saw the private dining room. The room was built into the foundations of the building, tucked away out of sight down a long corridor, and it was only visible to the rest of the restaurant from a panel of glass in the door. Making sure there was no one coming, I snuck down the hall to take a closer look. What I saw through the glass were all the tell-tale signs — shiny grocery store balloons, half eaten cake, cone shaped hats — it was a child’s birthday party.

What I had been searching for in this entire article, I had found in this restaurant, and I guess had really been in front of my face the entire time. People had come to this restaurant for the same reason why Mark Bittman and my grandfather had gone to Antonio’s restaurant in Brooklyn Heights: great Italian food in their neighborhood.

If you want a full meal of good Italian food accompanied with excellent service, I recommend going a little farther afield, to these more residential neighborhoods. And while you’re enjoying a decadent bowl of bolognese and you see, out of the corner of your eye, a few gentlemen with slick backed hair, speaking in hushed tones, just take comfort that the establishment you find yourself dining in respects tradition. But it might be smart to leave an extra generous tip.

Dante Pilkington is always on the run.

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