Commentary: Restaurants that reference crime and gangsters play a risky PR game in Singapore

SINGAPORE: From art to cuisine, sport and vogue, Italy has made countless critical contributions to popular culture. So it’s rarely comely that some Italians would possibly perhaps well very effectively be pissed off when one among the nation’s least pleasing exports is faded as a advertising gimmick.

Italy’s Ambassador to Singapore, Dante Brandi, was once removed from amused about an Amoy Avenue restaurant called Gotti Italiano selling a mafia-themed occasion in March. He wrote on Fb: “Naming your club after an unsuitable criminal family and catching prospects with a ‘Hip Hop Mafioso’ night is completely no longer unlawful, but – allow me to speak – is unquestionably of a dubious taste.”

Rightly or wrongly, many aloof gaze the mafia as emblematic of Italy. It’s faded as shorthand by eating areas, bars and cafes around the arena to conceal Italian-model hospitality that “you would possibly perhaps’t refuse”.

Granted, this usually is a winning formula. In 1973, inspired by Mario Puzo’s most spicy-selling book on a fictional Italian-American crime family, the Corleones, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar-winning cinematic adaptation, an Omaha entrepreneur opened a restaurant named Godfather’s Pizza.

Thanks in no tiny section to its witty mafioso-themed advertising, within the mid-1980s, it grew to change into the third-greatest pizza chain within the US. This day, Godfather’s Pizza brings in nearly about US$1 billion every year in income.