Hunts Point: Where To Eat (With Strippers)
It’s midnight on a Monday night, and the walls of Fratelli’s Pizza Café are thumping with the music from the Hunts Point Triangle strip club next door. John Fratelli is kneading dough for pepperoni rolls and leafing through Forbes between fielding orders from the wholesale market workers.
(”Hey, John! Send over a pie at 1:30, willya?”) Sometimes, John says, strippers from next-door come by for whole lasagnas. “I don’t know how they do it!” he says. “They eat a whole lasagna and then dance all night!” He clutches his stomach and laughs.
Restaurants in Hunts Point cater to the people who work hard slinging fish and breaking down sides of meat (and stripping). Manhattan might be the restaurant capital of the world, but it’s actually this South Bronx neighborhood that is essential to the way we eat. Whether you’re picking up broccoli at D’Agostinos, or enjoying a porterhouse at Peter Luger, much of the fresh food you buy has passed through the wholesale markets in Hunts Point.
The Hunts Point food-distribution center is the largest wholesale food market in the world. It’s made up of three entities—meat, fish, and produce markets—that supply restaurants and supermarkets throughout the country. Thousands of employees at the market work through the night to ship food to the sleeping city.
The market sits on a desolate South Bronx peninsula jutting into the East River. Planes from LaGuardia take off directly across the water and roar low overhead. The neighborhood feels remote from Manhattan, but it’s vital to the city.
Although the market is large, it’s often startlingly old-fashioned; many of the companies at Hunts Point are small and family-owned. And although the neighborhood looks gritty, it often feels like a small town. Guys just off work wave out their car windows to each other, and when they stop by a nearby restaurant, the person behind the counter already knows what they want.
“It’s a blue-collar job engine,” says produce market co-president Matthew D’Arrigo, of D’Arrigo Bros. Co. “Thousands of guys come through—customers, drivers and workers . . . you’ve got a real hardworking-man kind of mentality.”
That intricate infrastructure of moving food in and out, 24 hours a day, makes for a lot of hungry people. So where are the best places to eat in the neighborhood that feeds the city?
Fratelli’s Pizza Café is justifiably famous for its broccoli-rabe hero. The sautéed broccoli rabe has a sheen of olive oil and comes on a soft roll, studded with golden-brown cloves of garlic. John, Joey, and Mario, the three Fratelli brothers, learned to cook from their immigrant parents. Fratelli’s hours are the same as the wholesale market’s: open continuously from midnight on Sunday until midnight on Friday; closed on weekends.
According to Mario, who works midnight to noon, there are a number of advantages to this arrangement. For one thing, he’s able to make long-simmered stocks and tomato sauces, because there’s always someone there to tend it. And being so enmeshed with his suppliers is also a good thing:
“We get everything from the market,” he says, “and the workers there order from us, so they make sure I get the best product at a good cost.”
D’Arrigo, who supplies Fratelli’s with its broccoli rabe, and who eats there often, says:
“It doesn’t hurt, that’s for sure, being right across the street.”
Hunts Point used to have a reputation as one of the most dangerous places in the city. But this area, like the rest of the city, has gotten considerably tamer over the years.
Nick Papamichael, the owner of Sugar Ray’s Café, a 24-hour greasy spoon and doughnut shop next to Fratelli’s, has plenty to say about the neighborhood.
“They’ve really clamped down on the hookers,” he says. “If you see a good-looking hooker, just say ‘Officer, I’m lost!’ And if they have teeth? Then you know they’re undercovers.”
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