Location: Near Federal Plaza,
Manhattan

“A bottle of red, a bottle of white
It all depends on your appetite
I’ll meet you any time you want
In our Italian Restaurant.”
Billy Joel
Scenes From An Italian Restaurant
The Stranger Released: 1977

In DARKNESS CALLS, Ryder and Diana share a meal in Diana’s favorite place — Luigi’s Italian Restaurant. It’s the kind of place you can’t live without. Nothing fancy, but the staff is like family and the food is standard fare served in heaping mounds.

That’s Luigi’s!

A lot of people have wondered why this is Diana’s favorite haunt. Why not a Cuban place since Diana is of Cuban descent?

For starters, in the area surrounding Federal Plaza, you’re more likely to find Italian or Chinese restaurants thanks to the proximity to nearby Little Italy and Chinatown. To get basic Cuban or other Latin foods, you’d have to head uptown to Spanish Harlem, the West Side, or Ninth/Tenth Avenues where you can find those amazing hole-in-the-wall places where the food is cheap but amazingly good.

Diana Reyes’s favorite dish — Shrimp scampi with a side of garlic bread!Plus, where else would you find a preponderance of food just loaded with garlic! Just what a vamp needs for a case of major agita. In fact, that’s just what happens in DARKNESS CALLS. Diana has ordered her favorites — a basket of garlic bread and shrimp scampi made with roasted garlic. It takes all of Ryder’s willpower not to reel away from the table.

Of course, after Ryder gets over the initial worry that the woman to whom he is incredibly attracted seemingly has a garlic fetish, he even grabs a piece of the garlic bread and wolfs it down just to prove to Diana just how foolish men can be when it comes to impressing a woman.

This is actually one of my favorite scenes because of the dark humor and the sensual tension that’s developing between Ryder and Diana.

Luigi’s makes appearances in other books in THE CALLING. In DEATH CALLS, Diana has lunch with her pregnant best friend and ex-college roommate at Luigi’s. I think this is one scene that ended up on the cutting room floor, so look for it in Deleted Bits.

In BLOOD CALLS, Diana shares another lunch with Ramona Escobar. In this book it’s actually been a little while since Diana has visited her favorite place and when Ramona asks her why, Diana admits that it has to do with Ryder, the garlic bread and her new life. It’s a rather telling scene about where a simple meeting in an Italian restaurant has taken Diana in her life.