Lydia Visits Holy Rosary

Emmy award-winning television host, best-selling cookbook author, and restaurateur Lidia Bastianich visited Holy Rosary in March 2011. Holy Rosary appeared in episode 112 (Kansas City/New Orleans Father’s Day) of Lidia’s television show, Lidia’s Italy in America, which airs on PBS. Lidia also wrote about her visit to Holy Rosary in her book, Lidia’s Italy in America. Here’s what Lidia had to say about her visit to Holy Rosary:

“When we decided to open Lidia’s in Kansas City in 1998, in the Freight House, in the Crossroads Arts District, near Crown Center, it was our first venture outside of New York City. I get asked all the time: why Kansas City? It is smack in the middle of America, and, after all, we wanted to share our product, traditional Italian food, with America beyond New York. Little did we realize how effective the Italian immigrants before us had been in bringing Italian culture and food to Kansas City.

Columbus Park served as Kansas City’s Italian neighborhood; it is not far from the city center, with the Missouri River defining one of the neighborhood’s boundaries. Columbus Park was the area in which many immigrants got off the riverboat; many Italian immigrants came to Kansas City between 1890 and 1920 to work on the railroad and in the meat-packing industries, and Columbus Park became the Italian ethnic neighborhood, full of mainly Sicilian immigrants.

I wanted to know the history of the Italians before me in Kansas City, so, on a misty March morning, Tanya and I went to Columbus Park to see what Italian heritage was still there. We were told to visit Scimeca’s Italian Sausage Co., which had been making sausages for over seventy-five years, and La Rocca Grocery. Mike greeted us at La Rocca’s, but it is Joseph La Rocca who runs the shop, with his two nephews Mike and Frank. One could see, from all the blackand-white pictures on the wall, that the store had a family story to tell. The story was of Italy, of Italian food products needed by the immigrants, and now by stores and restaurants selling and cooking Italian.

The La Roccas were very generous with their time and information, so much so that Mike walked us two blocks over to the Holy Rosary Church, which is the epicenter of all things Italian in the neighborhood. The ladies of the church still put on quite an Altar for St. Joseph’s Day, and, as luck would have it, we were visiting in March, a few days before St. Joseph’s. When Mike La Rocca took us to the Holy Rosary Church, he showed us the basement, where about fifty of the local Italian women and men were busy baking, icing, and molding the cakes and cookies that would decorate St. Joseph’s Altar. We could have been in Sicily, the setting was so real and intense.”