Giusto Priola arrived in New York City at the age of 27. Behind him was a family already working in the restaurant business in Brooklyn: a bakery, a pastry shop. “I started working with them, with a three-month permit.” Then, a chance meeting with a lady from the Italian Federation, Anita, prompted him to try the famous green card lottery. He wins it. “As soon as I arrived, I won! There were people who had been here for ten years and had never succeeded. Me in the second month….” But he quickly clarifies, “I’m not here because I won the green card. I wanted to stay. The green card was just a support.”
He comes from Misilmeri, in the province of Palermo. After two years in the family bakery, he opened a dessert workshop for restaurants. “But it was too tiring. I was working too much, I decided to quit.” Then the opportunity: one of the most important photography studios in the world, Pier 59. “Inside was a restaurant. I started in the cafeteria, after a year I was manager.”
In its seventh year, the opening of its first restaurant, Cacio e Pepe. “We’re still open, 21 years. Which for New York is a lot.” After Covid, a new project: Pasta Eater. “It was born in the United States for the United States, but the raw materials all come from Italy. Pasta is our flagship-some people get offended because they say we also have Michelangelo, but we’re talking about food here. “He also recently opened Pasta Eater and Go, for takeout only, on 59th Street.
When asked how the perception of Italian cuisine has changed, Giusto Priola is clear: “People like me who have come here recently are looking for authenticity. Even those who have been here for 20 years don’t want Italian-American.” And on Americans, “Many Italians say they don’t understand anything, I never said that. The New Yorker knows Italy, he travels, he knows how to choose. When he goes to Naples, he looks for real pizza. And here he appreciates authentic cuisine.”
The hardest time was during the pandemic. “In Italy it was a disaster. The pictures of the trucks with the coffins-I will never forget them. I was afraid. I had worked so hard but still had nothing of my own.” Then help came: “For months I didn’t pay rent. When I reopened, for four months I paid only 50 percent. That saved us.” But New York, he admits, has never fully recovered: “Rents are high, many work from home and move out of Manhattan. Something is moving, though: we work a lot more at lunch than before.”
The secret of success for Giusto Priola? “Being authentic. Don’t distort yourself. If you make spaghetti with meatballs for the American, then the Italian next door turns up his nose. We make everything in house: pasta, bread, desserts. We also offer dishes that are unusual for the American public, such as white lamb ragout. It throws them off at first, then they appreciate it.”
And the most common mistake for an Italian trying to open a business in New York? “Thinking that the American doesn’t understand anything. If you think that way, it’s better not to come. The American appreciates us if we stay true to our identity.”
On the menu, there is a signature dish: Pasta Giusto. “A fettuccine with butter, parmesan cheese and ham, whipped in the parmesan cheese mold. But we also make pasta with seafood, wild boar ragout, parmigiana with fried eggplant.”
And if after so many years the city has not yet tired him, it is for a very simple reason: “The energy of New York never tires me. I chose this city. And I continue to choose it.”
The article Giusto Priola: when originality becomes the winning secret comes from TheNewyorker.
