May 21 (Bloomberg) -- When Tony May arrived from Italy in New York in 1963, all he wanted was a good plate of pasta.

``Every Italian restaurant I'd go to had food I'd never even heard of,'' says May, who worked his way up in the New York restaurant business and opened the trend-setting San Domenico in 1988. ``They all served chicken parmigiana and fettuccine Alfredo and something called `shrimp scampi' that didn't make any sense at all. Scampi is an Italian prawn, not a dish of shrimp.''

Fortunately, through his and other restaurateurs' efforts to change the image of Italian food, such dishes became passe as Americans learned to love regional dishes like lasagne alla bolognese, vitello alla milanese and bistecca alla fiorentina.

Now, says May (born Antonio Magliulo near Naples), Italian food is going through an important new stage. The traditional regional cooking of Sicily, Tuscany, Campania and Liguria coexists with a global style of Italian cuisine based on ingredients once unavailable to cooks outside of Italy.

May led a seminar on this export-driven evolution at the new Italian Culinary Academy in New York, where students spend 29 weeks -- 18 in Italy -- learning authentic Italian cuisine.

``The misunderstandings about Italian cuisine drive me crazy'' he said. ``Everybody thinks they can cook good Italian food without knowing the background, the traditions and the ingredients necessary to be authentic. Twenty years ago it was almost impossible to find good extra virgin olive, balsamic vinegar, prosciutto and Parmigiano outside of regional Italy. Today they are exported everywhere, so that there is no excuse to make second-rate Italian food. And it doesn't have to be regional as a result.''

Going Global

May, a founding member of the nonprofit organization Gruppo Ristoratori Italiani and author of the textbook ``Italian Cuisine'' (2005) for the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, insisted that the ``folkloric image'' of regional Italian food has been transcended by this global access to Italian ingredients.

``You still have regional Italian cooking in Italy, but the early southern Italian immigrants to America could not get their own beloved ingredients, so they had to alter their cooking to become Italian-American. Today, with so many great Italian wines, olive oils and pastas available -- even fish and mozzarella shipped overnight -- chefs in New York, London or Tokyo are cooking at the same level as chefs in Rome, Florence and Palermo.''

Local Ingredients

Antonio Bandini, Italy's consul general in New York, explained that ``in Italy we still have the trattoria serving what we call `cucina alla casalinga,' a homey, family style of regional cuisine. But upscale ristoranti serve more individual specialties not tied to the terroir for their ingredients. Still, we have a lot of labeling problems with ingredients, so people must become educated about what is authentic and what is not.''

An example of questionable labeling would be an olive oil labeled ``produced in Italy'' or ``packaged in Italy,'' meaning it could come from anywhere in Italy or even be shipped in from another country and packaged in Italy. A bottle stating the oil was produced and bottled in a specific region like Tuscany or Umbria is a far better indication of quality.

Cesare Casella, dean of the Italian Culinary Academy and owner of New York's Maremma restaurant, concurred: ``It used to be very difficult to cook with the products of the past. In Italy, at the trattoria level, they used excellent ingredients because they had very local vegetables, fruits and seafood they knew how to work with. Here people too often buy inferior- quality ingredients and don't expect much from the results. Polls show that Italian food is Americans' favorite ethnic food, but for most people Olive Garden is still their idea of a good Italian restaurant.''

Olive Garden Version

In fact, while the Olive Garden's Web site says its specialties are ``inspired by the Culinary Institute of Tuscany,'' with which it partnered in 1999, the menu for its New York unit has little that Tuscans would call their own, including ``Mussels di Napoli,'' ``Sicilian Scampi,'' ``Chicken Parmigiana'' and ``Fettuccine Alfredo'' -- the same kind of dishes that Tony May found in New York back in 1963.

Authenticity and education are the principles on which Italian Culinary Academy is based, according to Dorothy Hamilton, founder and chief executive of International Culinary Center, which houses both the Italian academy and the French Culinary Institute: ``Our students not only spend 18 weeks in Italy at top restaurants, but while they are in New York, all classes are taught in Italian by a `total immersion' method. We also have a series of visiting Italian chefs who work with Cesare Casella to teach them modern Italian cuisine.''

May ended his remarks -- before heading for a buffet lunch of dishes like Parmigiano flan with balsamic cream, risotto with nero d'Avola red wine and zucchini pudding with pecorino cheese sauce -- by noting that ``last year, Gourmet magazine listed five Italian restaurants among the top 50 in the U.S. None of the chefs were Italian-born, but all of them are cooking authentic Italian cuisine. But without authentic ingredients, they'd still be cooking things like shrimp scampi.''

(John Mariani writes on wine for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on this story: John Mariani at john@johnmariani.com.

Last Updated: May 21, 2007 00:07 EDT