Quote:
Originally Posted by valo403
Italian is kind of funny in that places, particularly those that started out family run, are more restaurants with people from Italy in the kitchen than they are "Italian restaurants". It's such a varied cuisine, most people default to pasta but that's really such a minute portion of it. Even tomatoes aren't really a huge part of Italian cuisine, but we tend to think they are. Italian-American adds so many weird twists, from combining a bunch of different regional dishes to taking small peasant dishes and packing them with tons of protein and cheese it's really a cuisine all to itself.
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This. A million times this.
Most people don't realize tomatoes came from the new world, so Europeans haven't even had them as part of their cuisine for all that long (relatively speaking), yet somehow tomato sauce, pasta, and pizza are all people think Italian food is. They're thinking Italian-American, not Italian.