Dining is an important drive wheel in the cultural economy of New Orleans. For at least a century and a half, tourists have come here to eat. What these visitors sought out in the early twentieth century was not just oysters and gumbo, but also Italian food, then the hottest new trend in what we today call “ethnic cuisine.” Find out how the Sicilian immigrants who populated the turn-of-the-century French Quarter came to build a regional pasta empire and laid the foundation for the restaurant scene we know today. Justin Nystrom is Associate Professor of History at Loyola and Director of the Center for the Study of New Orleans. He is the author of New Orleans after the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom and Creole Italian: Sicilian Immigrants and the Shaping of New Orleans Food Culture.