- Messages
- 17,197
- Location
- New York City
One of the things I love about NYC is the constant flow of new immigrants from different countries as it gives the city a fresh jolt of people, energy, cultures, etc.
One of the fun quirky things that also comes out of it is that as the older cultures move on - the third and fourth generations are not interested in the old neighborhoods and old family businesses - the newer immigrants sometimes take over.
This is very visible in the pizza business in NYC. Sure, there are the institutions - the big famous pizza places that are still family run (and make a ridiculous amount of money), the national chains that are run according to some corporate plan and the new "hip" pizza places where a slice of organic, blah, blah, blah pizza costs $5 - but there are still many plain-Jane pizza shops that are nothing more than a counter, a place immediately behind it to make the pizza, a bank or two of pizza ovens behind that and a few to several tables and chairs scattered in front or in the back (oh, and a stained drop ceiling, a few scattered pictures of either Rome or NYC on the walls and dispensers of napkins, red pepper flakes, parmesan, oregano, salt and garlic salt either clustered in a stand or two or randomly spread throughout).
I have been frequenting the plain-Jane pizza shops (there's one and sometimes two on nearly every block in parts of the city) since the '70s when they were run and worked by, mainly, Italian immigrant and 1st/2nd generation families. By the '90s, that started to change and the shops were bought and run by, at that time, a lot of Indian and Pakistani families. At first, it was a bit jarring to seeing Indian immigrants flipping pizzas and asking with an Indian accents if you wanted your slice very hot or a soda with it, etc. But after awhile, it just felt right.
I got to know the family running one of the shops in my neighborhood and the story was textbook: They came from India, had saved up to buy the pizzeria, the entire family worked there and they were going to buy more shops and bring more family members over as they saved money here while still sending money to India (but, also, some in India were saving to come here). There was no complaining about America by this family; to them, this was the land of opportunity and they were going to work insanely hard, educate their kids and build a life now and better life for their kids and grandkids. India's economy is much improved today, but then, it was struggling.
But as noted, that was in the '90s; today, these same plain-Jane shops are owned and manned, more often than not, by Mexican or Latin American immigrants. The shops look the same, but the families owing and working in them keep changing based on the immigrant dynamics at the time. Nothing says more to me about NYC than that the same - literally the same - pizza shop that I went to in the early '80s that was owned and run by Italians went through an ownership period by Indians and now is owned by Mexicans - but it looks about the same and the pizza is just as good. God bless crazy America.
