By 1910 the French Quarter was more Italian than French. Sicilian immigrants had arrived in huge numbers in the 1880s and 90s, and they ran the grocery stores and fruit stalls and family restaurants on streets that still carry French names. Antonio Monteleone, a Sicilian cobbler, opened shop on Royal Street around 1880 and bought a hotel at Royal and Iberville in 1886 that the family expanded through 1928 — one of the few American family-owned hotels to survive the Depression. In 1906, Salvatore Lupo watched Italian dock workers juggling their lunch and stacked it all on a round sesame loaf at Central Grocery, 923 Decatur. The muffuletta was born. Not every chapter is on a plaque. In 1891 a New Orleans mob lynched eleven Italian men — one of the largest mass lynchings in American history; no marker explains what happened. The food is where the story holds.
