The Shopping & Tasting Tour
Arthur Avenue is an enclave of family-run food shops that carry on old-world Italian traditions.
Our Shopping & Tasting Tour replicates the Saturday ritual of shopping on Arthur Avenue followed by a sit-down lunch at one of the oldest, most classic restaurants in NYC.
The tour starts in front of the Arthur Avenue Retail Market. We then visit bread bakeries, butcher shops, delis that cure their own salumi and make fresh mozzarella daily, tasting bits and bites along the way. We'll visit a shop that has been making fresh pasta since 1935, and the Arthur Avenue Retail Market, first erected by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to be a haven for the pushcart vendors of old New York. Whether this is your first time visiting Arthur Avenue, or you've been coming here all your life, you'll learn something new. Along with all the food, we'll share with you the history of this enclave and introduce you to the shopkeepers who are the third and fourth generation owners of their family businesses.
The last stop on the tour is Mario's, open since 1919, where we'll enjoy an Italian American feast.
"We walked through all the stores, and it was this giant, happy sensory overload. Every business had such a sense of history, and every item had a personality."
Jenny Kroik, The New Yorker
OUR TOUR HAS BEEN FEATURED IN:
Our family has been on Arthur Avenue since 1918
First a baccalà store, then a butcher shop...
Albino and Grazia Oteri immigrated from Naples and opened their baccalà shop in 1918. In the 1950s their son John turned it into a butcher shop which was featured in the Academy Award winning film "Marty" starring Ernest Borgnine.
In 2012 Danielle Oteri and her husband Christian Galliani began hosting tours that mirrored their own weekly shopping trips to the neighborhood and Arthur Avenue Food Tours was born.
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