Judging by the tour buses and grinning hawkers outside our Chinatown office doors, tourist season is back in full swing in New York, and if you're coming to town, we want to help.

Should you be visiting our Chinatown/Little Italy digs, hooray! You're coming to one of the most fun food neighborhoods in the city. But you need to know where to look and where to avoid. Visitors are often surprised when we tell them that Little Italy isn't an ethnic neighborhood anymore, that "real" New York Italians neither live there nor visit its eateries.* These days it's more or less home to schlocky restaurants and bakeries that thrive on dishing mediocre or downright bad food to out of towners, and gift shops trading in Sopranos quotes on cheap t-shirts.

* However, plenty of Italian tourists go, a phenomenon I'm still trying to explain.

But the neighborhood is still well worth a visit, both for the Little Italy institutions that are still awesome and for its proximity to Chinatown's many edible wonders. The two neighborhoods are so closely intertwined that it's easy to do them both in a day, especially with this guide in hand.

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