The Week of Italian Cuisine in the World returns this year, one of the most extensive programs dedicated to promoting Italy’s food and wine sector. Established in 2016 as a legacy of the themes introduced at Expo Milano 2015, it has helped shape a recognizable narrative of the Italian agri-food supply chain abroad, highlighting quality, sustainability, biodiversity and gastronomic identity. Over ten years, it has generated more than ten thousand events in over one hundred countries, involving institutions, businesses and local communities.
The tenth edition, scheduled for 2025, expands this approach even further. The chosen theme, “Italian cuisine between culture, health and innovation,” aims to describe gastronomy as a set of practices that combine tradition and research: an Italian culinary model that remains solid despite ongoing transformations.
In New York, this shift in perspective meets a context already accustomed to the daily presence of Italian cuisine. The city is home to one of the largest communities of Italian restaurateurs, bakers and chefs abroad, many of whom have become reference points for residents and visitors. Their work represents a significant share of the global imagination around Italian food, often more influential than institutional promotional campaigns.
Here, the Week of Italian Cuisine is not just a themed festival: it is an opportunity to highlight a professional ecosystem that consistently upholds the reputation of Italian food, from neighborhood trattorias to the city’s most innovative restaurants. Italy’s bid to have its cuisine recognized by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage—reaffirmed in this edition—finds in New York a concrete laboratory where tradition and experimentation coexist naturally.
The video produced for the 2025 New York edition shows the faces of around thirty restaurateurs, bakers and chefs who, through images and gestures, depict their everyday work in the city’s kitchens. It reminds us that “food is not only nourishment but also culture and tradition”: these are just some of the people who make Italian cuisine recognizable in New York and contribute to spreading its flavors around the world.
The work of these businesses often intersects with the need to protect the authenticity of products and recipes, a recurring theme in the official initiatives of the Week. This is especially relevant in the United States, where the threat of Italian sounding remains widespread and where Italian restaurateurs and producers have long collaborated with institutions and associations to promote certified ingredients and protected denominations.
The 2025 edition aims to highlight how Italian cuisine can represent a healthy and sustainable dietary model: in recent years, interest in Mediterranean diets has steadily grown in the United States, with Italian communities serving as one of its main sources of dissemination.
Alongside the cultural dimension, the Week also underscores the innovation processes that characterize the entire supply chain: research on raw materials, transformation techniques, new distribution models and waste reduction. These elements are an essential part of the promotional work coordinated each year by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs together with the Italian System’s partners, and implemented locally by embassies and consulates around the world.
