Italian. Well, sort of.

New York City, 1912-2011

During a recent stay in New York, I walked over to 139 West 10th Street, curious to see where the Italian restaurant depicted in John Sloan’s 1912 painting Renganeschi’s Saturday Night had been located. Sloan lived only two blocks away and is known to have eaten there occasionally, joined at least once by his friend Robert Henri, a fellow artist of the Ashcan School of realist painters. During the early twentieth century, artists and writers living in Greenwich Village were fascinated by their neighbors, often making them the subject of their art.1 Capturing the excitement of the city, Sloan’s painting features three young women sitting around a table on a girls’ night out; it is a scene so familiar that updating the clothing styles would bring it into the present day. In fact, it was fascinating to find that the old building still houses a restaurant, and things had not changed as much as one might have expected.

When Renganeschi opened in 1898, ethnic restaurants had been gaining in popularity for more than two decades. During this time, there were reports that it was becoming difficult to find real Italian food in New York. Although a menu does not reveal how the food is actually prepared, the dishes on this a la carte menu from 1916 appear to be authentic, a perception reinforced by printing the bill of fare in Italian. Nevertheless, the cuisine at ethnic restaurants had been gradually changing for some time. As historian Andrew Haley recounts in his recent book Turning the Tables, Italian restaurants, German beer halls, and Chinese chop suey houses increasingly added standard American fare to their menus in order to attract more middle-class customers.2 Indeed, Renganeschi’s table d’hote menu, or set menu (listed on the front cover), offers a typical selection of roasts, salads, and vegetables, mostly described in English. The fixed price depended on what dishes were ordered and when the meal was served. The lowest cost of a five-course table d’hote was fifty cents. However, the price increased to sixty-five cents if lobster was selected instead of fish for the third course, and seventy-five cents if the dinner with lobster was served between the hours of 5:00 and 9:00 PM. Other interesting information on this menu include the references to an outside dining area called the “summer garden” and the Italian Swiss Colony winery in California, showing their wines in wicker-clad squat bottles historically used for red wines from the Chianti area in Tuscany.

In 1927, Sicilian-born Giovanni Ballato bought the restaurant from Giovanni Renganeschi, renaming it John’s Old Place, an anglicized reference to their shared first name. Surprisingly, this menu from about 1936 employs a number of French culinary terms to describe the increasingly Americanized fare. The price of the set dinner, here called the “Dinner de Luxe,” is now only one dollar, reflecting the effects of the Depression during the intervening years. Ballato owned the restaurant until 1938, proud that it had been in continuous operation for forty years, except when it had been closed down for four months during Prohibition, a law that neither owner seems to have taken too seriously.

There have been many bars and eateries in this townhouse dating back to 1845, each reflecting another chapter in the history of the Village. In the 1950s it was the College of Complexes, an unconventional supper club featuring all black décor that included the walls, floor, and ceiling. Hosting informal lectures, open forum discussions, and poetry contests, budding writers often jotted down their fleeting thoughts on whatever space was available. When it was a beatnik bar and coffee house named the Ninth Circle, playwright Edward Albee saw graffiti in the men’s bathroom that inspired the title of his play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A few years later singer Janis Joplin lived in an apartment on the third floor; the place was also frequented by other music legends of that generation like singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, and guitarist Jimi Hendrix who jammed in the basement.

De Santos is the name of the restaurant now situated at 139 West 10th Street. Featuring bare brick walls, the place has a cozy, rustic feeling; the small garden patio at the back is still being used as a dining area. While I was looking around, I asked the manager what type of food they served. “Italian,” he replied, adding after a moment’s thought, “Well, not really Italian, it’s sort of Italian…it’s based on Italian,” struggling to describe the cuisine. His answer was close to what the proprietor of Renganeschi might have said a hundred years ago. Savvy restaurateurs are still adjusting ethnic cuisines in new ways to attract more customers—the restaurant that preceded De Santos at this location was the Caffè Torino, an “Itasia” that added Asian dishes like spring rolls and beef tataki to its basic Italian menu.

Owner Luis Miguel Amutio created the De Santos concept in Mexico, establishing restaurants in Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara, before opening this one in New York in 2008. The menu and wine list are each shown in two scans due to the large (11 x 17 in.) format. The bill of fare includes Italian-inspired starters like octopus carpaccio, grilled calamari, and smoked mozzarella with prosciutto, along with a selection of homemade pastas. There are other types of food, such as the basil crusted swordfish with cajun corn, and a hamburger served with truffle fries, bacon, and cheddar cheese. The menu also offers American standards like fillet of beef, rack of lamb, and roast chicken, reflecting the type of choices offered on Renganeschi’s table d’hote menu. Still in all, as much as some things stay the same, restaurants continue to change with the times. Improving efficiency while simultaneously making a hip fashion statement, De Santos is the first restaurant in New York to equip its staff with Apple iPads for taking orders and sending them wirelessly to the kitchen. Some believe that similar devices eventually will replace paper menus. Is the waiterless restaurant, once the quest of entrepreneurial restaurateurs in the early 1900s using mechanical inventions like the Automat, coming around the corner again in the digital age?

Notes
1. Gerald W. McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village: A New York Neighborhood, 1898-1918, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 2001.
2. Andrew P. Haley, Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the Middle Class, 1880-1920, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2011.