Originally Posted by
pinniped
Italian food in Italy is uniquely heavenly. Nobody else does it like they do. In the U.S., I enjoy the heavier American-style Italian a couple times a year in the winter. American Italian tends to be a big carb bomb and often not terribly flavorful. But it's also the comfort food of my youth, so I enjoy it around the holidays.
I have family in Italy, so I've got a bit of experience and I think there's a lot of bad Italian food in Italy, but when it's done well it's phenomenal. When they try to get too outside their circle of competence it really can fall in a horrible heap (orange and pomegranate risotto anyone?) Italian food is about the ingredients, IME, Italian-American is about quantity, so invariably the quality of the ingredients isn't great and then it's either fried or covered in copious amounts of sugary tomato sauce or cream sauce; if you've got quality you don't need all the stuff piled on top of it. I'd say you could just drop the Italian bit and call it American food because it's really got so little in common with Italian.