Little Italy once consisted of a large swath of lower Manhattan, stretching from the Bowery to Lafayette Street and Houston Street in the north, down to Worth Street in the south. In 1910, there were 10,000 Italians living in this lower Manhattan neighborhood, one of the poorest parts of New York City at the time.<\/p>\n

But as Italians moved up the economic ladder around the middle of the 20th century, they moved to middle-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn and New Jersey. Today, what constitutes Little Italy is merely a five-block stretch of Mulberry Street.<\/p>\n

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Visiting Manhattan? Make sure to bookmark our list of the best restaurants in Little Italy (NYC). Photo credit: Alex Haney<\/a><\/p>\n

For visitors to New York seeking \u201cauthentic\u201d Italian-American fare, heading to Little Italy might be tempting, as Mulberry Street is flanked by a legion of mediocre restaurants that are in a competition with each other over whose \u201cgravy\u201d is redder, whose meatballs are bigger, and who can make a more outlandish fake Italian accent with which to speak to tourists.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re in Little Italy and your stomach rumbles, you don\u2019t have to eat subpar Italian fare. If you know where to stick your fork, you can find some great Italian restaurants\u2014which sometimes means hitting some of the eateries on neighboring streets within the old boundaries of what constituted Little Italy. After all, according to the Italian-American Museum<\/a>, NoLIta isn\u2019t an acronym for \u201cNorth of Little Italy,\u201d but rather \u201cNorthern Little Italy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here are our picks for the nine best restaurants in Little Italy (NYC):<\/strong><\/p>\n