Scenes from an Italian Restaurant

"Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" is a suite built from three shorter songs, "The Italian Restaurant Song", "Things Are OK in Oyster Bay" and "The Ballad of Brenda and Eddie". Joel cited side two of Abbey Road and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" as models for stitching them together, and Phil Ramone helped join the pieces with orchestral backing. Joel said it was recorded as one piece in about seven takes, with the band playing together in the studio.

It opens as a piano ballad in which two old classmates meet in an Italian restaurant, moves through a Dixieland section with clarinet, trombone, tuba and saxophone, and then turns to a rock and roll tale of Brenda and Eddie, a prom king and queen who marry young and divorce. The strings of the outro bring it back to the restaurant. Richie Cannata plays the saxophone solos that open and close it.

Joel first played it on 6 May 1977 at the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University, where he dedicated it to Christiano's restaurant in Syosset. In 2012 he admitted that was like saying Yankees in New York. On the 2008 anniversary edition of The Stranger he said it was written about Fontana di Trevi, a restaurant across from Carnegie Hall, where a waiter spoke the line about a bottle of red and a bottle of white. The song was never a single, but Rolling Stone ranked it number 324 on its 2021 list of the 500 greatest songs. Joel named it his favorite of his own compositions on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Stevie Chick of the Guardian called it an amiably bonkers highlight, and the paper's reviewer called it an impressive tour de force at Wembley in 2016. Brenda and Eddie became main characters in the 2002 Broadway musical Movin' Out. A recording of the first performance was released in July 2025 as part of a playlist for the HBO documentary.