Who

Selimaj owns six pricey Italian eateries in New York, including Nino's, Nino's Positano, Nino's Tuscany, Nino's Bellissima, and two branches of Osso Bucco. And as you probably know from those TV commercials, he serves free water at Nino's.

Backstory

Despite the fact that all the restaurants in his portfolio are Italian, Selimaj is most assuredly not. He grew up in Albania and landed in New York in 1978. That same year, along with his brother Bruno Selimaj (who'd already been toiling in New York restaurants for several years), he started Bruno Ristorante on East 58th Street. Nino started opening restaurants named after himself—rather than his brother—several years later.

Of note

Clad in a suit-and-tie ensemble with an American flag pin fixed to his lapel, Selimaj is famous for a bizarre series of commercials where he exclaims, over and over again in his still-thick Albanian accent, that the water at Nino's is free. (Yes, that's bottled water.) He's also known for his food-related publicity stunts. In 2006, he started offering a $1,000 pizza at his newest restaurant, Nino's Bellissima, topped with Petrossian caviar and Maine lobster tail. One person nutty enough to order it? Cop-turned-media fixture Bo Dietl.

No joke

Nino and his brother aren't the only Albanian restaurateurs in New York posing as Italians. Paul and Giorgio Kolaj, the owners of the Famous Famiglia pizza chain, are Albanians, too.