Paige Halter:
St. Louis. Known as the Gateway to the West. A city perched on the Mississippi, where waves of immigrants, entrepreneurs, and dreamers left their mark. And, if you wander just a few miles from downtown… you’ll find yourself in The Hill — a historic Italian-American neighborhood where old-world traditions still simmer.

Halter:
Before you even step inside Mama’s on the Hill, you're hit with the unmistakable smell of garlic, tomato, and frying oil – a strong introduction to the Italian cuisine the restaurant has to offer. But there’s a small, playful chatter about who invented the toasted ravioli.

Ace Hornbeck:
We are actually the home of the toasted ravioli, where it was invented.

Halter:
Ace Hornbeck, Mama’s manager has no doubt about where toasted ravs came from. But just a few blocks away, another restaurant stakes its claim.

Anthony Gitto:
We know where it originally came from, but everybody has their own story, you know.

Halter:
That’s Anthony Gitto, Charlie Gitto’s son who runs his restaurant. And for decades, these two kitchens — and their loyal customers — have argued over who can really say they invented St. Louis’s most iconic bite.

So… why does it matter who dropped the first ravioli in the fryer? Is it about fame? Glory? Or is it something deeper — about credit, culture, and who profits when immigrant food becomes mainstream?

This is Who Owns the Flavor? A podcast tracing America’s culinary roots one stop at a time, starting here on The Hill. Along the way, we’ll float down the Mississippi — to Clarksdale, Memphis, and finally New Orleans — tasting the dishes that define America, and uncovering the stories of the communities that built them.

Because behind every plate is a bigger question: Who really owns the flavor?

Halter:
West of St. Louis’s city center is The Hill, an Italian American neighborhood literally painted with culture. Fire hydrants and crosswalks are decorated red, white and green. Small houses, many of them built in the early 20th century, are mixed in with Italian restaurants, delis and markets.

On a warm Sunday afternoon, the streets are mostly quiet and empty. By dinner time, Mama’s is packed with eager customers. They arrive on foot and packed into sedans, hoping they’ll be able to get a table that fits their whole family.

Let’s flashback to this same neighborhood, largely unchanged, sometime in the 1940s. In a little restaurant called Oldani’s — later Mama Campisi’s — where a cook made a recipe-changing mistake. A mistake, sure… but a delicious one.

Hornbeck:
One of the cooks downstairs had a little bit too much to drink and dropped raviolis in the oil instead of the water, and instead throwing them away, just gave 'em to the guys at the bar. So the next night the guys at the bar said ‘hey those were good, so you know let me get those again.’ So that’s basically how it was started.

Halter:
It was a hit. Italian families in The Hill had been rolling out pasta for decades. But toasted ravioli was different. It wasn’t just another dish — it was a gateway to recognition.

Gitto:
We started it. Ours are some of the best around. Everybody says that they're just, our toaster raviolis are phenomenal. It's our own recipe. So it's, there's all kinds of imitations, but we are the original.

Halter:
Hornbeck recalls that the recipe was started by Mama’s, but a key player led to the spreading of the dish…

Hornbeck:
Charlie Gitto's mom took it and ran with it. So they made it more famous, but it was actually started here. So, we are actually the home of the Toaster River where it was invented, but she kinda made it more famous.

Halter:
But to Gitto…

Gitto:
I'm not really in that old school mindset of, like, you know, hey, it's just ours, like nobody else can have it. I mean, you know, cooking is subjective. You know, it's like art. Everybody has their own way of doing things. And, you know, I'm about community and taking care of the Hill. And, you know, sharing the story of the toasted ravioli, because at the end of the day, it's exposing St Louis, it's exposing the Hill.

Halter:
But as toasted ravioli spread across St. Louis, and eventually the country, the story got blurry. T-Ravs are now something you can buy frozen at Walmart … So who really profited from that?

So begs the question: who owns the flavor?

If we’re going off of originality - then it doesn’t get much more original than the Hill. A St. Louis Magazine article said that “No other neighborhood in the country has so many restaurants whose menus feature “history” sections.” According to Hornbeck, The Hill’s roots date back to a wave of Italian immigration.

Hornbeck:
Which was right around, you know, the early, early nineteen hundreds to 1910s. So when they came over, you know, they were all here. And then first World War happened. All the men went over fighting and the ladies opened up their houses to make some money off all them recipes they had just brought over, and they did so well with that, that after the end of the war, they just opened restaurants.

Halter:
Pasta was made by hand. Bread baked daily. Tables set in front parlors became the first dining rooms of what would later become some of St. Louis’s most beloved restaurants. Recipes tossed down from generation to generation became more like a secret treasure map in The Hill… now imagine seeing that secret treasure for sale at a cheap price in aisles at Walmart…

Is it fair? Is it just life? Who gets a say? Who Owns the Flavor…

Halter:
On the Hill, the majority of the competition is friendly. But what happens when a single dish is made mainstream, sold in supermarkets, and very little recognition goes back to restaurant roots? Especially when that dish has such deep connections to a single culture.

Restaurant owner Ben Poremba says there is an important meaning to the food you eat – it’s more than what meets your tastebuds.

Poremba:
In Italy I studied gastronomy, I studied not how to cook food, but to appreciate food as really as like an academic subject. Whether that meant understanding a little bit of the history of food commerce, understanding global agriculture and food production, understanding the industrialization of food, understanding how artisanal food is being made and marketed.

Halter:
Poremba is an Israeli native, and he learned the art of food from his mother. He started the Bengelina Hospitality Group with his wife, Angela in 2008. And now, he owns many restaurants, with perhaps his most famous being the Delmar Divine Deli.

The deli is said to be a celebration of Yiddish and Jewish American food culture. For Poremba, his goal is to make the moment you walk into the deli feel like a comprehensive Jewish deli experience, a skill he attributes back to his gastronomy days.

Poremba:
By studying those things, when I open a restaurant for me this cultural aspect of food, the ambience of the restaurant, the inspiration, not just for the menu but for the furniture and for the art and for the beverage offerings and all that stuff, create an experience that is kind of transporting and unique.

Halter:
So what’s the point? Plenty of restaurants want to give their customers an “authentic” vibe… Does it matter where the roots of the restaurant come from? Can you even trademark a food like the toasted ravioli?

Morris Turek:
No, you can't, you can't protect food as intellectual property.

Halter:
That’s Morris Turek, a trademark attorney located in St. Louis. He specializes in trademark and copyright law — the kind of work that determines who gets credit when a name or product becomes valuable. But when it comes to food … the rules are different.

Turek:
A lot of people also think like recipes are eligible for copyright protection and that that isn't the case. Generally speaking, a recipe is is just a recipe. It's a list of instructions to make a certain dish, and you can't really protect the concept or the idea or the method or the process of a recipe.

Halter:
So, the fight over toasted ravioli isn’t a legal one — it’s cultural.

Turek:
Nobody owns the flavor of toasted ravioli, just like nobody owns the flavor of beef, and nobody owns the flavor of a pancake, and nobody owns the flavor you know, a cherry pie. Everybody and anybody can make a cherry pie, and maybe those cherry pies taste very similar, maybe identical. Can't protect that, definitely.

Halter:
If no one can own a recipe… then what does it mean to claim it? To say it’s yours, your neighborhood’s, your city’s?

Linda Reeder:
I think it's really interesting when you're talking about sort of appropriation of food cultures. 'cause Italian American cuisine is, it's really, it's its own thing.

Halter:
Linda Reeder is a professor of modern Italian History at the University of Missouri. She says that toasted ravioli is distinctly Italian American and can’t be traced back to any region in Italy. In fact, much of the Italian food Americans consider staples, like dried pasta, were brought back to Italy from America.

Reeder:
There’s this whole idea of authenticity and purity in food culture. And that is something that, for example, Professor Cinotto has really really pushed back on. And he is one of the ones who says, ‘No, we have to understand Italian American cuisine as its own authentic regional cuisine. Not better, not worse than Italian.

Halter:
Michael Pagano has spent more than twenty years working in community arts in St. Louis. And he says that food — no matter where you are in the city — is one of the strongest threads that ties people together.

Pagano:
And it's interesting because, like, if I reflect back on the 20 plus years of experience in community arts, a lot of the bright inflection points in those events and programming are connected to food and involve collaboration that food is an essential part of.

Halter:
But food also sits at the shifting intersection of power and race, especially in a city with a long history of segregation and redevelopment. In a city shaped by constant reinvention, survival can be complicated. Still, even with change, flavor persists — in ways both humble and proud. That mix — of old and new, of legacy and arrival — gives St. Louis a taste unlike anywhere else.

Halter:
But as Pagano says, even claiming a story, or a flavor, can be complicated.

Pagano:
I think like, kind of the notion of, like claiming the story, or like the credit, or whatever, it almost feels like a gentrifying act to, like, have an ownership on cultural history that's like so up here in the 21st Century, like, has nobody ever fried a ravioli before? But, you know, I kind of find it like in this in the context of this conversation, I like, I see it as, like, operating in the same way that gentrifying forces operate.

Halter:
Because even a dish as simple as toasted ravioli can mean something much bigger — it’s not about patents or profit. It’s about pride.

Gitto:
There's a lot of different frozen toast raviolis that, like, you know, people can go to the grocery store and buy a toasted ravioli frozen and then like to do it in their oven. But then, you know, that seems so natural and so like second nature to us here in St Louis.

Halter:
That pride runs deep. But when does pride become possession?

Turek:
That is correct though I don’t know that I often hear about restaurants fighting over flavors. There might be disagreements about who came up with something first, but that’s not really an intellectual property issue… there are a lot of different origin stories for lots of different things, and nobody can 100% verify — no different than for food items.

Halter:
Everyone wants a bite of the story… but who owns the flavor? Our next stop: Memphis. Where the debate isn’t about pasta… but pork. Wet ribs versus dry ribs — both beloved, both fiercely defended.

It’s a story about smoke, sauce, and the soul of a city. Because when it comes to food, every taste tells a story. And everyone wants to own the flavor.

Sound effect credits from Epidemic Sound

“Lunch Break in Milan”
“By, Honks, Many 03”
“Steam Boat, Horn, Flute, Honks”
“Promenade, Sidewalk, Close Pedestrians, Light Traffic, Seagulls 03”