If you’re a pasta lover, don’t be shocked if your favorite Italian restaurant bids you ciao (that’s chow in Italian) before year-end. The city’s second most popular kind of ethnic restaurants after Asian cuisine is currently suffering one of the highest failure rates among city dining establishments, according to the New York State Restaurant Association. An estimated 70 to 90 go belly up for each one that manages to carve out a niche.

Some Italian restaurateurs characterize the business as one of the toughest and most hotly competitive in the city, which, if you include pizza joints, includes roughly 3,000 restaurants throughout the five boroughs.

Nicola Civetta, owner of Primavera, an upscale East Side restaurant, figures 10% to 20% of the city’s Italian restaurants in business at the outset of the year will close before the year ends. Survival is getting much more difficult, he said, citing in particular the agony of surging competition, higher rental and insurance costs, and the rise of casual Asian-fusion dining. He thinks many newcomers flocking to the business for the “supposedly easy money” are especially vulnerable since they lack sufficient restaurant know-how and are poorly capitalized. “A lot of them,” he believes, “are just barely hanging on.”

Italian-born Michael Guido learned the hard way that Italian restaurants can give you financial heartaches. In the mid-1990s, Mr. Guido, a baker in Rome, decided to strike it rich in America. So he and his wife, Maria, moved to the city, borrowed $150,000 from some friends, and opened Guido’s on Manhattan’s West Side. Given their expertise in Italian cooking, the Guidos figured the restaurant couldn’t miss.

Alas, miss it did. Within three months, two Italian eateries opened within two blocks of Guido’s, forcing it to lower prices and cut the staff. It just barely managed to survive the next two years before shutting its doors. “I never thought an Italian restaurant in New York City would be such a struggle,” he said. “It was like war: Operating costs got out of hand, we could no longer maintain the quality of the food, and we had no choice but to close,” Mr. Guido said.

One neighborhood Italian restaurant that has mastered the art of survival is Trattoria Alba, a moderately priced Midtown dining spot on 34th Street between Second and Third avenues. I recently dined there with my wife, Harriet. After we paid the check, the captain presented a bowl containing Lotto tickets and each of us was invited to take one free for a Mega Millions drawing. We lost in the drawing, but it was still a winning experience because the food was good and the price was right.

Actually, that drawing is part of a month long promotion to celebrate the restaurant’s 15th anniversary. So far this month, Trattoria Alba – which is open seven days a week, sports a staff of 15, and can seat 210 customers on two levels – has given away more than 2,000 tickets.

“This is a people business and we believe in giving something back to the neighborhood,” said Myra Bauta, 43, a mother of six, who, along with hubby Mel, owns the restaurant. “We could have offered a free drink with the meal, but that’s not really giving meaningfully,” she added.