Who

The founder of Felidia, Bastianich is the godmother of high-end northern Italian cuisine. She's also the mother of restaurateur Joe Bastianich and an investor in Del Posto, the king-sized Italian restaurant in the Meatpacking District co-owned by her son and Mario Batali.

Backstory

Born in Istria, a peninsula that was used to be part of Italy, but now belongs to Croatia, Lidia arrived in New York in 1958 at the age of 12. She later married a fellow Istrian named Felice Bastianich and in 1971 they opened their tiny first restaurant, Buonavia, in Forest Hills; a few years later they opened a second spot, Villa Secundo, in Fresh Meadows. Both restaurants were locally popular, but they served largely run-of-the-mill Italian-American fare, and neither made waves with people outside the borough. That changed in 1981 when the Bastianiches made the move to Manhattan, opening the resolutely authentic northern Italian eatery Felidia (an amalgam of her and her husband's name) in a converted brownstone on East 58th Street. Now more than a quarter-century old, it remains one of the city's most acclaimed Italian restaurants. (The Times' Frank Bruni reaffirmed its three-star rating in August 2006.) And Lidia has emerged as a household name in recent years thanks to her various PBS cooking shows (Lidia's Italian Table, Lidia's Family Table), which have all been filmed at her home in Queens.

Of note

In addition to overseeing her flagship restaurant, Felidia, Bastianich has a hand in a number of other spots in town. She helped her son Joe Bastianich open the theater district spot Becco; she's an investor in two of Joe's culinary ventures with Mario Batali, Esca and Del Posto; and she's gone beyond NYC, too, opening eponymous restaurants in Pittsburgh and Kansas City. Now in her 60s, Bastianich is rarely behind the stove herself. (although she can occasionally be found at Felidia, she's left the cooking to longtime chef Fortunato Nicotra.) But she remains the person who deserves much of the credit for introducing New York to haute northern Italian cooking, notwithstanding the fact that Mario Batali gets a good deal more press as the leader of the Italian culinary revolution.

On the side

Like any big Italian restaurateur, Lidia has a line of pasta sauces. With her daughter, Tanya Bastianich Manuali, she also owns a travel agency that specializes in food-centric excursions to Italy. The two paired up in April 2007 to co-author an Istria-focused cookbook, Lidia's Italy. A companion television show of the same name now appears on PBS.

Personal

The follicular-challenged Bastianich is now divorced from Felix. She lives in the Douglaston section of Queens. If you want to catch her on the internet, hit up her MySpace profile, where she lists Mario Batali, Bobby Flay, and Alton Brown as her top friends, her height as 5'0", and pegs her income at "$250,000 or higher."

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