The founder of Felidia, Bastianich is the godmother of high-end northern Italian cuisine. She's also the mother of restaurateur Joe Bastianich and an investor in Del Posto, the king-sized Italian restaurant in the Meatpacking District co-owned by her son and Mario Batali.

Born in Istria, a peninsula that used to be part of Italy (but now belongs to Croatia), Lidia arrived in New York in 1958 at the age of 12. She later married a fellow Istrian named Felice Bastianich and in 1971 they opened their tiny first restaurant, Buonavia, in Forest Hills; a few years later they opened a second spot, Villa Secundo, in Fresh Meadows. Both restaurants were locally popular, but they served largely run-of-the-mill Italian-American fare, and neither made waves with people outside the borough. That changed in 1981 when the Bastianiches made the move to Manhattan, opening the resolutely authentic northern Italian eatery Felidia in a converted brownstone on East 58th Street. Now more than a quarter-century old, it remains one of the city's most acclaimed Italian restaurants. And Lidia has emerged as a household name in recent years thanks to her various PBS cooking shows, which have all been filmed at her home in Queens.

In addition to overseeing her flagship restaurant, Bastianich has a hand in a number of other spots in town. She helped her son Joe open the theater district spot Becco; she's an investor in two of Joe's culinary ventures with Mario Batali, Esca and Del Posto; and she's gone beyond NYC, too, opening eponymous restaurants in Pittsburgh and Kansas City. These days, Bastianich is rarely behind the stove herself, but she remains the person who deserves much of the credit for introducing New York to haute northern Italian cooking. [Image via Getty]