NYC: Restaurant Review - Mama Mia

Mama Mia - lunch on November 18, 2016

Shawn and I ended up having a running joke throughout our three and a half days in New York. We spent the whole time craving lasagna. I started it because on my flight to JFK, I saw a commercial featuring a steaming plate of lasagna. I wanted some. I passed on that want-some to Shawn. Turns out both she and I could eat Italian food anytime, any place. It also turns out that each time we went to an Italian restaurant for a meal, we were easily sidetracked by other dishes and never ordered the lasagna.

Case in point, we yelped our way to Mama Mia, were greeted by a friendly hostess, seated in an almost empty restaurant (for some reason, New Yorkers don't eat lunch at noon but sometime later) and each of us ordered something other than lasagna. We thought about it but her favorite pasta was manicotti and mine is always, always spaghetti and meatballs. So that's what we each got.

No regrets here because it's hard to go wrong with spaghetti and meatballs and, wait for it, it's even harder to have bad food in New York. I'm convinced of it because everything we had was delicious, this lunch included. Mama Mia is again the kind of place I try to patronize whenever I go out to eat. According to their website, they're family owned by the Schiattarella family and have been in business since 1971. They started out as a one-window pizza shop. When we arrived there, it looked to have grown into a prime-location restaurant bigger than Sam's Place and many others I've seen. The service was also top notch, from the hostess to the waiter to the guy who filled our water glasses; everyone was really nice.

Even a nearby patron (the restaurant filled up as we ate lunch and it got closer to 1 o'clock) was able to offer some friendly directions once she learned our post-lunch mission was to find The Little Pie Company (next post). Google maps decreed it wasn't that far from where we were having lunch and this native New Yorker told us we'd know we'd found it once we smelled something incredibly delicious. Our friendly hostess had never heard of it before and we told her she should check it out. If only we were going to pass her way again, we'd tell her about it. But our touristy selves didn't quite know the lay of the land so we didn't know if we'd see her again to report back. But she promised to check it out for herself and off we went to our next foodie mission.