Service Description

*As featured in CNN Travel, The New Yorker, the New York Times, the LA Times, NPR, and Eater.* Arthur Avenue is part of the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx where the Italian American food traditions of the early twentieth century never disappeared. While the rest of New York modernized, consolidated, and handed its food culture over to supermarket chains and delivery apps, Arthur Avenue is still keeping it old-school. The bakeries still bake the same bread they baked in 1918. The butchers still prepare every cut of me as you request it. The pasta shop still cuts your fettucine to order. The pastry shop still fills your cannoli to order, right in front of you, because a pre-filled cannoli is an insult to the shell. When you visit Arthur Avenue, you are stepping into a living, breathing food culture that has survived a century of change through sheer stubbornness and the conviction that old ways are sometimes the best ways. The Italian Americans who moved to Westchester and New Jersey in the 1970s still drive back every weekend to do their shopping and their kids are still doing the same. aThe Arthur Avenue Shopping & Tasting Tour is your introduction to all of it. Starting at the Arthur Avenue Retail Market, you'll make your way through the neighborhood's best food shops — each one family-run, each one with decades of history behind the counter. On-the-go tastings include cannoli, bread, mozzarella, and house-cured salumi. The tour ends with a sit-down Italian American feast at Mario's, open since 1919. It includes: fried calamari, meatballs, Borgatti's ravioli, and the legendary off-the-menu pizza. (All included in the $95 price.)