More than two million Italians arrived in New York between the late 1880s and the early 1910s, many coming through Ellis Island and most desperately poor. Large numbers settled in Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn; others headed to Lower Manhattan, in particular to Greenwich Village — along Sullivan and Bleecker Streets — and, most famously, to the area surrounding Mulberry Street that would become the Little Italy of the Lower East Side.
Antonio Veniero, born near Sorrento in 1870, arrived in New York when he was 15 and went to work in a candy factory. He bought the building on East 11th Street in 1894 and began producing his own handmade confectionery there; when customers asked for something to go with it, he began offering espresso and biscotti. It was backbreaking work: There was no electricity; ice came in hundred-pound blocks; deliveries were made on horse-pulled carts. Pastry was baked in a coal oven in the store’s backyard, which is now part of the cafe.
Zerilli’s father, Frank, began working at Veniero’s in the 1930s and bought the business in 1970. Zerilli did weekend shifts at the bakery in the late ’70s and came on full time in 1981. He opened the back-room cafe in 1994, the year of the store’s 100th anniversary. His father died one month later. Both Zerilli and Frankie went to college before returning to work at the store but Zerilli often says to his son, “Remember, Grandpa said, ‘The best college is right here.’” He shows me a favorite photo of his father with the other Frank, Sinatra that is, taken around 1980. Sinatra, looking amiable, his arm around Zerilli’s shoulders, wears a crucifix and is holding a cigarette and a large sesame seed biscuit in the same hand. “It’s called a regina,” says Angelo Santamaria, Veniero’s head pastry chef. “Sinatra liked it crunchy.”
FRANK SINATRA'S FAVORITE COOKIES
