The writing above the windows on this 1940 Municipal Archives photo is too fuzzy to make out. East of 10th Avenue were getting into the mainly residential section. Chimes play Give My Regards to Broadway at 7:45 p.m. every day. 20.95. It was purchased by William Zeckendorf in 1957, who remodeled it and renamed it the Manhattan Hotel, signified by a giant neon M. Count Basie, Lester Young and Artie Shaw were the house musicians at the hotels Blue Room Plaza. Street venders in Southeast Asia were hawking all the fixings you would need for a tasty lunch or dinner, much as they do today. He has spent the better part of the past decade eating out, and it is clear from the first few pages of Ten Restaurants that those restaurants are not the whole story he has to tell but what you could call transformative prototypesplatforms from which to open a discussion of the way America eats, the ethnic and racial and regional and class and immigrant realities that its kitchens represent, and the entrepreneurs with the passion or the wisdom or simply the ambition to embrace (and profit from) the simmering stockpot of social change. 20.95. If you were able to read a menu that ran to more than a hundred dishes (one of the pleasures of Ten Restaurants is its reproductions of dozens of menus), and had the time to linger over fourteen courses, you could go to Delmonicos, and everyone who could did. I ordered the calamari arrabiata - amazing ! From Business: Classic Georgian cuisine with a modern twist in the heart of New York City's Chelsea area. What the French call maisons de rendez-vous, not to mention the better brothels, served lunch and dinner to their guestssomething I discovered toward the end of lunch one day at a place, near Tangier, I knew only as an excellent Spanish restaurant, when couple after couple (there were only couples) scampered upstairs with their bottle of amontillado before the cheese and the quince paste were even cleared. I would like to thank you for the all the time and effort it took to put this post together. Sold . How America Ate: Leones Italian Cookbook. SeriousEats.com, December 8, 2010. Props to them for delivering to Hampden, providing us with an alternative to the abysmal Pop's Pizza. Another, surprisingly, was Howard Johnsons, the brainchild of the testy and obsessively controlling entrepreneur from Quincy, Massachusetts, who gave it its name, its steep-roofed architecture, its orange and turquoise paint, and (for children) its thrillingly predictable menuas in twenty-eight personally created ice-cream flavors, butter-grilled hot dogs, and deep-fried clamsand who, in the process, became the franchise food king of the American highway, providing millions of travelling families with a guarantee of the same fresh, tasty meals under any of its thousand orange roofs. The Times Square area has remained a motion picture center, although it is no longer the headquarters of the industry, and the Film Center Building continues to serve New York: North Point Press, 2009: 277. New York Like a Native. Since then, Sylvias has become a sprawling, landmark restaurant that can seat four hundred and fifty people. A couple of doors away is #428 West 44th, a townhouse once owned by actress June Havoc, sister of ecdysiast Gypsy Rose Lee. "Neither had any formal training, but they learned, getting better and better as they went. The Milstein family purchased it, renamed it the Milford Plaza, (retaining the big M) and launched a TV commercial touting its affordable prices, the lullabuy of Broadway, that seemingly played during every commercial break. [Published in the September 19, 2016 print issue.]. For centuries, inns served travellers from whatever provisions happened to be in the kitchen of the innkeepers wife; respectable women, forced by circumstances to travel alone, were expected to dine in their roomsthe beginning of room service?and couples ate together, downstairs, in a room off a bar that was reserved for men. It may be that Soul himself shared the anxieties of a new, urban, postwar society eager to reconfigure old distinctions between different kinds of money and status. Mamma Leone Shuts Doors in Manhattan Restaurant Associates purchased Mamma Leone's restaurant in 1959. Virtuoso Enrico Caruso talked Louisa Leone into converting her Manhattan house into the 20-seat Leones Italian Ristorante in 1906. The Four Seasons: The People. In The Four Seasons, Auction 26 July 2016. Very good condition. My only concern is that when they are busy, they take their phone off the hook. Johnson was not a populist. Crowds Line Up at Leones for Italian Dinners. New York Herald Tribune, January 19, 1952: 11 (illustrated). We had fried chicken and smothered chops and candied sweet potatoes and, tucked among the greens and black-eyed peas, a side of macaroni and cheese. With so much of the motion picture industry concentrated in the area, it was not unnatural that support services would locate nearby, in the less expensive section west of Eighth Avenue. "Everything was made from my mom and dad's family recipes," Silverio notes. I have a sticker of them on my sports car. Ray, Rachael. And, yes, the tour buses stop there now. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. I was on vacation in New York in the early 90s and after we got checked in to our hotel we were looking for a place to eat and my friend David H. said how about this place well this was one time Im grateful that I didnt let the prices or the fact i had to borrow a sport coat to meet the dress code scare me away because it was the best plat of spaghetti I had ever eaten . Leones Italian Cookbook. The fact that I ate there often (or at all) was entirely thanks to my friend (and budding gourmand) R. W. Apple, who at the time was a correspondent for the NBC Nightly News and testing the limits of an already famous expense account. I am a jazz buff, but that place was too pricy for me. Lombardi's Pizza 6527 Pizza $$Nolita This calls for a consult with the Indispensable Walter Grutchfield, who reports that they were produced here from 1945 to 1956. What a great night! Order Online. The service was great, everybody I interacted with was warm and inviting. 315.3 The Film Center was built at the end of the same block, fronting Ninth Avenue with entrances on Ninth and on West 44th Street. We will repost on W42ST social media this week. Inside, I had been wondering why there were all these framed photos of rock musicians, till I dug deeper and discovered this had been the Record Plant, where dozens of hit albums by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith were recorded. This is all so great! The culinary contributions of beloved places like Le Bernardin, Babbo, Jean-Georges, Restaurant Daniel and Momofuku Ko are well known. He began life with the burden of a family debt to pay and ended it a multimillionaire, with a yacht, three big houses, a penthouse on Sutton Place, a table at the Stork Club, and a taste for restaurants like Le Pavillon. What did people search for similar to mama leone's in New York, NY? It is designed to keep you up, thinking, and, as I did this summer, returning to its rich, and often troubling, pages. Until taller buildings clustered around it, the illuminated glass globe at the buildings apex could be seen for miles. He was 88. Leifs That Are Green [SpliceToday] I mention the Brazen Tavern, 356 W 44th, because its very old building boasts a painted ad for Fletchers Castoria, painted anywhere between 1890 and 1925. Start selling in one click; Add or edit items; Import from Amazon; Import from eBay; . Rockaway Boardwalk, at 78th Street, Queens, circa 1938-39: Credit Max Ulrich, New York City Parks Photo Archive Railroad Crossing to Rockaway Beach at 108th Street, Queens, October 1, 1939 . It contained offices for Paramount Studios and was until 1967 home to the Paramount Theatre. For me, it was about the singing, not about the food. There was a slight mistake on my order with the method of cooking (it was so good & I figured I didn't ask the right question) they brought out another order (equally as delicious) when they realized the error". 1999-2014, when the building was demolished. The design features lambs and rams heads. His love for her magical corn cakes carried far beyond the pages of the freebie-weekly New York Press. An addition. I have only been in once, around 2005 or so. Martin, Douglas. (3) Leones husband Gerome ran a wine store downstairs and kept the restaurant going on other nights by inviting customers to dinner. What are some highly rated italian restaurants in New York, NY? It lives on in the form of ultra-humongous Tao and Hakkasan, the London-born giant that touched down here in the West 30s. Its time for another entry in FNYs Cross Streets of NYC series! The only trace left is Leones Italian Cookbook by Gene Leone (1967, Harper and Row). Sale Price $3.04 $ 3.04 $ 5.53 Original Price $ . Glenn also operated the now-vanished Times Square Gym on 42nd Street. People, of course, had been eating out for several millennia by the time the mysterious, and perhaps apocryphal, M. Boulanger boiled down the bones for his first soup. Fewer still not only introduced new foods and cuisines, but influenced our broader culture. Mamma Lones was one of the most special places to dine ever. Presently there is a trip hop duo named Hungry Lucy that has been playing electronica since 1998. 25 April 65: Big Apple, Mama Leones and the Worlds Fair: New York, USA. Tones 1960s Travels. Mama Leone's combined many of these images {love of music, amorous appreciation, spontaneity, and volatile personality} refining them into an early example of a "theme" restaurant, a place where the staged ambience is as important as the food. Local residents who were long denied modern dining options suddenly had choices. Having once made that stop myself, I can report that the food, while leaden, introduced people who werent Italian to the idea of Italian food at a time when the pasta most Americans dipped into was a can of precooked Franco-American spaghetti clinging to a thin coating of sugary tomato sauce. The house beers a red and a terrific blonde run you $2.50 for a pint and $7 for a pitcher.theres little space among the young bankers and advertising types who long ago elbowed out the boozy neighborhoodies who used to dominate. Queens neighborhoods wealth of globe-spanning cuisines. 7 elevated line, is not a restaurant (although theres now a tiny Arepa Lady cafe nearby). Today, the most touristic American restaurant may be Antoines, in New Orleans. Went there in high school 1974 with marching band. New York: Stream of Consciousness, 2009: 149. By the time Mamma Leones closed, nearly a century later, it was the citys largest restaurant, with eleven dining rooms and twelve hundred and fifty seats, not to mention more strolling accordionists than Manhattanites in sight. All rights reserved. LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Eugene Leone, former owner and operator of the famed Mamma Leone's restaurant founded by his mother in New York's theater district, has died following a long illness. Remembering Jackie Robinson [SpliceToday]. I didnt want to say added an addition., More detail on 331 W. 44th Street: (5) Leone, 1967. The name most prominently associated with the Studio is Lee Strasberg, who taught acting here from 1951-1982. Soon came chef-driven Vinegar Hill House, Fette Sau, The Farm on Adderley and later, $250-a-head tasting dinners in Bushwick. Freedman, Paul. The rent and other costs of doing business there got too high, said Bill Menzel, a spokesman. In fact, its hard to imagine that most Americans had ever heard of Le Pavillon or its overweening proprietor, even during his reign of terror among the citys moneyed classes. What an unforgettable experience! The interior features Tiffany lamps and murals by Everett Shinn. An ell was added in 1915. The great feasts of the aristocracy were cooked in the castle by a battery of chefs and consumed in vast dining rooms, where men and women could mingle freely. I didnt know that my mom know the people in this place where-in they were those who told me about what happened to my mom. Ill finish 44th Street in Part 2. We will be back - food was great, and customer service over the chart! Im not sure how either of those restaurants changed America, although they certainly changed New York. It is worth noting that by the time the restaurant closed, this summer, the power brokers lunching at those banquettes were as toned and trim as a teen-age California surfer. (6) Trillin, Calvin. Had a blast! As always, commentas you see fit. I earn a small payment when you click on any ad on the site. Broiled Filet Mignon. I recently came upon a paper menu from Leones circa 1961 what a variety, and wine for $16 a bottle! Mamma Leones: Spicy Tales of Sweet Success. New York Times, September 19, 1987: 33. Menu. See page 2- http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/1220.pdf. Emboldened by Red Roosters success, a dozen new cafes Italian, Indian, French, Japanese and crafted American soul have opened on Lenox since 2011. The Lambs Club, #128 West 44th, a social hangout for actors and theater enthusiasts, was founded in 1874 and has a number of clubhouses around town. that time I was looking for her for almost 3months and I just came to NYC from Victoria Hongkong. Your California Privacy Rights / Privacy Policy. Broiled Fresh Fish Of The Day Or Alla Livornese With Garlic Toast. Status came with an invitation, not a reservation. That experience made me to never be cheap when it came to how much a meal was going to cost but let the food determine what I thought about a restaurant. Its absolutely fascinating and reputed to be haunted. Meeting up with a friend from home who was dating a girl from Demarest, NJ, we had NYE dinner at Mama Leones. Sprinkle cheese on top. The offices were open all night, receiving films being returned from the theaters and preparing new orders. (Courtesy New York Public Library) Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, in 1971. In 1927, the Paramount Building, SW corner of West 44th and Times Square, supplanted the Times Tower as the areas tallest building. Add photo. FYI Smiths Bar is known for its incredible neon sign, a real landmark in my neighborhood. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Ten years after its completion, the Film Center Building housed over 70 film distributors, who sent films to theaters all over the city. One of our chaperone parents had last name Leone so we were really treated like royalty! Feb 8, 2016 - (Mama) Leone's Restaurant in new York City. 2023 Cond Nast. (Dont tell your mother, my boyfriend, who was black, said when we got on the uptown train.) Howe is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, as is his dog, Fannie. Ive decided to create a new FNY category to hold them. Broadway stalwarts such as Oklahoma!, The King and I and Hello, Dolly! to Asian countries for their lower labor costs. 25 April 65: Big Apple, Mama Leones and the Worlds Fair: New York, USA, Book Review: Restaurants in American Food History, How America Ate: Leones Italian Cookbook, Mamma Leones: Spicy Tales of Sweet Success, Mamma Leones Famous Carnevale Dinner, 1983, Forum of the Twelve Caesars The New York City Restaurant Archive, The Hawaiian Room The New York City Restaurant Archive, Lchows The New York City Restaurant Archive, Research Survey The New York City Restaurant Archive, The restaurant got its start when opera singer Enrico Caruso convinced Luisa Leone to operate a twenty-seat dining service in her living room at fifty cents a person. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. View full menu. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were listening to playbacks and making suggestions to the Double Fantasy album on the same night, December 8, 1980, they later returned to the Dakota Apartments on Central Park West and Lennon was shot dead by a crazed individual. There was a slight mistake on my order with the method of cooking (it was so good & I figured I didn't ask the right question) they brought out another order (equally as delicious) when they realized the error - not to my asking. Try it some weekend morning when your family has time to savor it. Cooking pots, set deep into stone counters, lined the main thoroughfares of ancient Rome. Miller, Bryan. I ate at Sylvias for the first time in the early sixties, not long after it opened, invited by a boyfriend at a time when Harlem was widely considered a no-go zone for white people of either sex. There is still a place with opera singing and Italian food called Caffe Tacci. All rights reserved. How could a place that few outside the neighborhood had even heard of rank nearly as high as Manhattans greatest? premiered here. Decommissioned in 1974, she became the centerpiece of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. 40-01 Little Neck Parkway 24A Little Neck, NY 11363. More information Mama Leones restaurant New York City, closed in 1987 Comments More like this More like this In the T Sq shot, the description notes looking south. But the pic, if Im not mistaken, is looking north. The one-two punch of a bright and affordable, provincial French menu and McNallys genius for hype (i.e., no reservations taken except for celebrities)drew the noshing millions. More information Mamma Leone's on 48th St - 1980 Comments More like this Nyc Park Park City Union Square Holiday Market As is the case with the telephone (invented by Antonio Meucci but recognized as by Alexander G. Bell), Elias Howe was not the first to conceive of a sewing machine, but he was the first to obtain a patent of a sewing machine using a lockstitch design, which became the workhorse model for many years. I often ate at Chez Panisse during a stint as a visiting professor at Berkeley, in the early nineteen-nineties, and by then it was an institution, the unassuming, vine-draped shrine of a global culinary creed. Several other movie theaters were built on Broadway, and the legitimate theater soon shared the area with motion picture houses. No one came. I was a graduate student living down the hall and subsisting on Milton, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and tuna curry (a can of tuna, a can of cream-of-mushroom soup, and a tablespoon of McCormicks curry powder, on rice). Butler, Stephanie. Leffs admiration for Cano and others he championed led him in 1997 to co-found Chowhound, the food blog that preceded all the others. The brothers and their descendantsin particular, a nephew by the name of Lorenzo, who turned out to be a visionary restaurateurfollowed the money steadily and successfully uptown until, at one point, there were four Delmonicos in the city, and, in the third to open, a French chef named Charles Ranhofer, who in short order became the most celebrated chef in the United States. I have been walking Manhattans numbered streets from east to west or vice versa so compulsively, Ive decided to create a new FNY category to hold them. The small space is chockablock with boxing memorabilia. I witnessed a septuagenarian trying to get the attention of another septuagenarian. I missed, of course, Delmonicos, which closed years before I was born, and, to my regret, I also missed the Mandarin, in San Francisco, where I spent January of 1967, the month of the Human Be-In, and, perhaps because of this, rarely ventured out of Haight-Ashbury, where even the soy sauce came laced with Acapulco Gold. (Boulanger sells restoratives fit for the gods, the sign on the door said.). Mariani, John, and Galina Mariani. Tourists heading for Mamma Leone's restaurant in Manhattan's Theater District will have to get their meatballs elsewhere for a while. Free shipping for many products! In January 2021, the Theater District, usually bustling even during non-matinee days, was cold and empty. Though they were standing only five feet away from each other, it was too loud for them to hear one another. It was at 2 South William Street, in the heart of the financial district, and it came with tens of thousands of square feet of seriously opulent dining space, including, in the Paris tradition, private rooms available upstairs for negotiating business deals or, perhaps, enjoying the pleasant combination of adultery and dinner. It was done in, Freedman says, by McDonalds. Paul Freedmans rich new book, Ten Restaurants That Changed America (Liveright), brings them to life and unintentionally raises a provocative question. Just a really nice experience. The new eating scene drew hordes of hungry new residents and ultimately the coinage of Brooklyn as a global brand. 21.25. I was there 38 years ago! For better or for worse, USC more than any other single restaurant buried formal dining for good. CLOSED NOW. Not the same thing at all. Leone's 366 Italian Pizza $$ "Thank you again Mama Leone's - your actions absolutely won us over!" more Delivery Takeout Start Order 2. Le Pavillon set the mid-century style for fine French dining in New Yorkmuch of it classic brasserie fare refined by its estimable chef, Pierre Franey, into an almost ambrosial simplicity. Since Juniors was shown in one of these shots, I have never eaten any of their menu items except for their cheesecake sort of like the Cheesecake Factory everywhere else, which they are known for, though I have never gotten it from that one despite going to locations at Grand Central Terminal, the Fulton Street Mall, and even at the Barclays Center during Nets games. A luthier is someone who makes or repairs lutes and other string instruments, a fitting name for the legendary guitar shop that moved from West 44th to 24th in 2015. But Freedman also knows that seasonal does not necessarily mean local in a city like New York, and that, for its powerful clientele, the prospect of being seen by similarly powerful people, all of them negotiating lucrative, glamorous deals in hushed tones, was perhaps the truly satisfying part of lunching back-to-the-wall at one of the Grill Rooms coveted banquettes. NYCs Christmas Streets [SpliceToday] Here 44th Street enters the Theater District. AWhimsicalAdventure. Required fields are marked *. [Updated June 21, 2022]. The companys objective is to give people who cook in restaurant kitchens an opportunity to create their own art. New York: Ballantine Books, 2019 (illustrated, menu). At its height, and after expanding into the President Theatre next door, Mamma Leones was the largest Italian restaurant in New York with 11 dining rooms and 1,250 seats, serving approximately 700,000 meals a year. Barely more than a block away from the Old Metropolitan Opera House, Leones living room overflowed on opening night, with Carusos invited guests seated on wine crates. The Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation put its sites and distribution offices in a building at 345 West 44th Street; the Paramount Pictures Offices and Film Exchange was on the same street at No. Order online for carryout or delivery today. Theres a separate universe in each NYC numbered cross street. Its true that five of Freedmans game-changers are, or were, in New York City: Delmonicos (Americas first restaurant in the 19th century), Mamma Leones (which pioneered the Italian restaurant for non-Italians), Sylvias, Le Pavillon and The Four Seasons. NEW YORK - CIRCA 1975: A view of the exterior of Mama Leones restaurant at 261 West 44th Street circa 1975 in New York City, New York. However, in years past, it was another place. Add eggs, cover and cook for 4 minutes or until set. These are some italian restaurants with a large number of reviews in New York, NY. I was in New York in 1979 and ate at Mama Leones. They don't modify the delivery time on the online order. Given that Paul Freedmans new book, Ten Restaurants That Changed America (Liveright), is largely a history of eating out in this country, its worth noting that the word restaurant, at least as food scholars define it, is as recent historically as the experience it describes. A painted ad for Meritex Ribbons can be seen at #599 11th Avenue, among other faded ads. Grab a slice of our delicious New York Combo or order one of our tasty pizza rolls. Cabaret, Godspell, The Sunshine Boys, Grease and Amadeus all premiered here and Humphrey Bogart originated the role of bad guy Duke Mantee in the Broadway production of The Petrified Forest in the 1920s. $21.00. It was said to be haunted by a ghost known as Hungry Lucy. The name refers to a young woman named Lucy Ryan who died in 1792. Reading Paul Freedman about America, stalking myself through the taste of meals at eight of his ten restaurants, each sampled for different reasons at different moments in my life, I began to draw the outlines of a world I shared with other people, people more or less like me, and to wonder what like me meant when it came to expectations of inclusion, of common flash points of reference, of understanding and participating in the coded language of what we eat and how it is prepared and who is sitting at all those tables around us. What a wonderful memorable evening. Howe was forced to defend his patent in a court case that lasted from 1849 to 1854 because he found that Isaac Singer with cooperation from Walter Hunt had perfected a facsimile of his machine and was selling it with the same lockstitch that Howe had invented and patented. Here are a lucky seven more restaurants of the past 30 years that although not all great by gastronomic standards left the Big Apple a different place. It never was a place where the cuisine cognoscenti gathered, but that fit Mama fine. I began within sight of the USS Intrepid, the aircraft carrier that saw service in the Pacific Ocean during WWII, the Vietnam War, and helped recover astronauts splashing down from NASA Mercury and Gemini missions. Broiled Sirloin Steak. By then, Mama Leones had expanded to the largest restaurant in the city, serving 700,000 meals a year in 11 dining rooms. The truth is that I remember nothing about those oysters or, in fact, about the rest of the meal, perhaps because later that night I conceived a beautiful daughter, somewhat hurriedly, in the middle of a hotel fire that we then managed to flee with two book manuscripts intact. Restaurants. New York Times, June 17, 1988: C24. The best spaghetti and meatballs Ive ever tasted. The Schraffts I knew best was at 61 Fifth Avenue, a few blocks north of my grandmothers Greenwich Village apartment, and I got to eat there whenever I visited as a child. I worked in the Famous Players Paramount building for a theater ticket broker on the 4th floor Im just a piss-on clerk but the boss says I can have a window seat over looking seedy Times Square. Grimes, William. Downtown customers finally discovered the areas charms. New York: Ballantine Books, 2019 (illustrated, menu). https://w42st.com/post/category/nostalgia/. Ive been around so long, I have histories just about anywhere I go. Nothing has ever been close to Mammas = sad when great and magical things go away. 9th Avenue, from 42nd to about 52nd, is known as the avenue in Manhattan where you can pretty much find any national cuisine youre looking for. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. It's true that five of Freedman's game-changers are, or were, in New York City: Delmonico's ("America's first restaurant" in the 19th century), Mamma Leone's ("which pioneered the. Anderson, Harriet Jean. He won the dispute and earned considerable royalties from Singer and others for sales of his invention. One time I did go to Smiths Bar with my brother before seeing a Broadway play, but that was mainly because he didnt want to down the avenue to Shake Shack due to his anti-fast food bias, and the food wasnt really anything to ramble about, though thats probably just me saying that. Woodss grandfather was hanged for a murder he did not commit; her father died of complications from German gas attacks suffered during the First World War. The industry at that time was headquartered in and around New York City. I visited the Belasco apartments a few yearsback. By the 1970s, the Times Square area wasnt what it used to be by a long shot and the Manhattan was getting a bit shoddy. They werent all bad. Watch. Looking forward to reading more of your posts. I love restaurants. Veal Francese. RachaelRayShow.com, May 9, 2022. That in turn propelled the boom in real-estate values that eventually doomed Pastis itself (although it is now slated to reopen in different form nearby). Mamas consistently resisted the citys restaurant trends and offered unpretentious food under false grape vines on red-checkerboard tablecloths. Its sprawling menu perfected the crazy-quilt, multi-category format copied by restaurants of every cuisine. These people fed me with the food my mom always eat, Spaghetti, meatballs and the best roasted chicken I ever taste as it was my moms fave. Pal Joey, Kiss Me Kate and Chicago have all played here but in recent memory, the theater is most famous for A Chorus Line, which set a record for continuous performances here. The mild childrens stomach trouble medicine was ubiquitously advertised on buildings in the early 20th Century. 3 Photos 10 Reviews . Short-sighted building owners converted it. Best mama leone's near me in New York, New York Sort:Recommended Offers Delivery Offers Takeout Reservations 1. And we still keep everything authentic." Women's Fashion. The Brazen, like Rudys, is shut down temporarily (it is hoped). (2) Mamma Leones menu, 1962. Ray, Rachael. Top Brands. And I wish that Freedman had gone further afield in his travels, told the story of the exemplary Mexican restaurants in, say, Austin or Santa Fe; or the first great steak houses in Omaha or Chicago; or one of the millennial beer-beard-and-baby places, across the bridge in Brooklyn, that have transformed (and democratized) eating out in this century.