Bastianich, Lidia

Lidia Bastianich (1947–) is a chef, cookbook writer, and TV host specializing in Italian cuisine. Since 1971, Bastianich has been the owner of six restaurants in New York City (Buonavia and Villa Secondo in Queens; Felidia, Becco, Esca, and Del Posto in Manhattan), one in Kansas City, and one in Pittsburgh (both named Lidia’s Italy). She is the co-owner, along with her son Joseph Bastianich, chef Mario Batali, and Italian businessman Oscar Farinetti, of the 42,500-square-foot New York branch of the high-end Italian food superstore Eataly (inaugurated in 2010). Together with Marcella Hazan, Bastianich has been the most successful among a group of Italian expatriates to New York who, albeit often with minimal culinary knowledge prior to emigration, since the late 1960s reinvented Italian cooking in America by detaching its image from the “red-sauce-and-garlic” pattern elaborated by early twentieth-century southern Italian immigrants, transforming it into a more varied and “authentic” style and popularizing it among a wide middle-class public. Actually, since the late 1990s Bastianich also reclaimed the immigrant tradition of Italian American cuisine, “rediscovering” it in a revisited version that insisted on quality ingredients.