Italian

Manhattan’s Little Italy is the one every visitor is pointed at, but the denser Italian food neighbourhood is Belmont in the Bronx, around Arthur Avenue. The area took its name from the Lorillard family, whose snuff mill stood there from 1792; Belmont means beautiful mountain, for the hills the neighbourhood sits on. Italian families arrived from about 1898, drawn by construction work on the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Garden, and by 1913 the area was being described as the Italian colonies of the Bronx. The indoor Arthur Avenue Retail Market dates from the La Guardia era, when the city moved the street’s pushcart vendors under one roof, and a number of the shops inside have stayed with the same families since. It is a working food street more than a restaurant row — butchers, bakers and cheesemongers alongside the dining rooms — which makes it as rewarding to shop as to sit down in, and it is a genuine trip from Midtown rather than a detour.

Live from OpenStreetMap, filtered to venues tagged italian within about a mile of Times Square — thin coverage outside that radius, and tagging is crowd-sourced, so treat this as a starting point.

No tagged italian spots turned up near Midtown right now.