For one weekend every month in 2025, Café Mars dedicated our full menu to spotlighting different regions around the world where Italian food has impacted food and culture. For each global event, Café Mars invited a chef representing each region into our kitchen to collaborate on the full menu. Learn more about each region we picked, and why, for the full Global Italian year:
Global Italian #1: Chicago
Chicago, Illinois is home to the country’s 3rd largest Italian population, with over 500,000 Chicagoans noting Italian descent. Though the first Italians arrived on the shores of Lake Michigan from Genoa in the mid 1800s, the bulk of Chicago’s Italians found their way there from southern Italy around the turn of the 20th century. They settled in the enclaves of Grand Crossing, Little Sicily, Taylor St., and Lincoln Park, and amidst other new American arrivals forged a representative cuisine reflective of their new and old lands.
Partner: Canal Bar
Global Italian #2: Ethiopia/Eritrea
Owing to the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and resulting occupation and expulsion, we created a lingering mingling of cuisines that explored throughout the menu. Despite the hostile invasion many Italians remained, married Ethiopian and Eritrean women and raised their families in Abyssinia. Although the cuisines did not merge some variations were made to local dishes. For example to reduce the heat in Shiro, tomatoes were added and pasta was served with a spicy ragu and berbere was added.
Partner: Bilena Settepani of Settepani
Global Italian #3: Arbëreshë
In the 1500s, in the legendary footsteps of the Albanian hero Skenderbeg, a stream of Albanians sought refuge from the Ottoman Empire. They settled towns and communities throughout southern Italy (especially Calabria, Basilicata, and Sicily), creating the Arbëreshë culture and language that live on to the present day. The Arbëreshë cuisine is much older than the other Global Italian cuisines, and the centuries of give and take have produced a dstinct cuisine that is unmistakable Italian.
Partner: Fejsal Demiraj of Amëz
Global Italian #4 – New Orleans
Starting in the 1870s, thousands of Sicilians fled Italy to try their luck in New Orleans and filled the French Quarter, prompting it to be known as Little Palermo. Working mainly on farms, in markets, and running food stores, they left a distinctly Sicilian imprint on the cuisine and culture of “the city that care forgot.”
Partner: Justin Koslowsky of Gianna
Global Italian #5: New England
We celebrated a quintessential region of Italian-American cooking and one where one of our co-chefs lived until he was 21 (Connecticut and Rhode Island). We are delighted to be cooking tonight with the chefs from another weird little restaurant, little friend (Providence, Rhode Island). New England was where over 4 million Campanians and Sicilians settled during the great migration of 1870-1940 and became a gravitational influence on the Northeast Corridor. Italians in RI and CT, and their food, helped establish that cuisine as stereotypically Italian-American with some of the finest examples of the traditional dishes, as well as disproportionate number of niche dishes.
Partner: little friend
Global Italian #6: Argentina
There is no more Italian region outside of Italy than Argentina, where nearly two-thirds of citizens claim Italian descent. Before there was even a country called Argentina, both Northern and Southern Italians flocked to the corner of South America, in two major waves over two centuries. Italians helped orchestrate revolutions that birthed the country, lent their rhythms to tango, imprinted their accent on the language, and made their food central to the table. Owing to a shared religion and being an early and large part of the populations, Italian have always been respected and not ostracized – unlike other regions of the world. Their vitality and influence is clear and present in the culture and the cuisine of Argentina.
Continued in Part 2: Café Mars Global Italian 2025?!
Dining and Cooking