Provino Mosca, an Italian immigrant, and his wife Lisa, had a restaurant in Chicago Heights, Illinois before they moved to New Orleans in 1946, after their daughter, Mary, married a Louisiana oysterman, Vincent Marconi. They opened Mosca's in Avondale, a remote area on the West Bank of the Mississippi River, in a building owned by New Orleans crime family boss Carlos Marcello, who became a regular customer of the restaurant. Marcello's son still owns the restaurant building. Provino died in 1962. Lisa, two of their children, Johnny and Mary, and Mary's husband Vincent took over the restaurant. "Mama Mosca" died in 1979 and Vincent died in 2004. The restaurant was damaged in Hurricane Katrina but reopened in 2006, repaired and with a larger, air-conditioned kitchen, but otherwise mostly unchanged. Johnny mostly retired after the hurricane, but Johnny's wife Mary Jo Angelotti, who took over as chef after Mary retired, continues to operate the restaurant with other family members, including Johnny and Mary Jo's daughter Lisa. Mosca's received an America's Classics award from the James Beard Foundationin 1999.
Location and cuisine
Mosca's is known for its out-of-the-way location, a seventeen-mile drive on U.S. Highway 90 from the Crescent City Connection bridge, and its ramshackle exterior, as well as for its distinctive Italian Creole food. Writing in the 1970s, pioneer New Orleans food writers Richard and Rima Collin described the restaurant as "a white shack on the left in almost total isolation" and rated it as one of New Orleans' "Best of the Best", calling it "a joyous place with no airs whatsoever, bubbling over with the noise of serious eating on a massive scale" and a "New Orleans institution". They described the food's heritage as deriving from "the middle of Italy, the Romagna-Lazio region, rich in seafood." In her New Orleans food memoir Gumbo Tales, Sara Roahen says, "Mosca's is just the sort of family-run restaurant that New Orleanians tend to covet: it's creaky, set in its ways, and no picnic to find." In an edition of Roadfood written after Hurricane Katrina, Jane and Michael Stern comment that the restaurant seems unchanged since its reopening. They ask the rhetorical question, "can this two-room joint with the blaring jukebox really be the most famous Creole roadhouse in America?"; then they describe the experience as a "culinary epiphany", and say that "roadside food gets no better, or more garlicky, or heartier, than this." Calvin Trillin, in a November 2010 article about the restaurant in The New Yorker, also remarks on its seemingly unchanged nature since 1946. He recounts that the Mosca family had once considered moving the restaurant to a more convenient location, but the idea had met substantial resistance from their mostly local customer base. Reviews of the restaurant often note that almost every party orders more or less the same items from Mosca's relatively short menu, served family-style in very large portions. These popular dishes include:
Spaghetti bordelaise, described by the Collins as "perfect homemade pasta and a remarkable, perfectly balanced oil and garlic sauce", and which Roahen calls "as much butter, oil, and garlic as your body can process without suffering a systematic failure."
Pineapple fluff for dessert, which the Collins called "a bit of delicious New Orleans kitsch."
