When Artie serves Tony and his men a dish with fennel sauce, Paulie jokingly asks if he can get AIDS from eating it. The Italian word for fennel, "finocchio", is also frequently used as a slang insult to indicate homosexuals; hence the joke.
The model car inside the drug dealer's office is the championship winning Formula One Williams FW18, driven by Damon Hill in the 1996 season.
The first of two episodes whose titles are tributes to songs by The Four Seasons. In both cases, the group's music is also part of the show's soundtrack, as it is in this show in the opening scene. Even more, both the sound and aura of New Jersey is especially evident in the later casting of the Four Seasons' iconic front man Frankie Valli as a Mafia capo. Valli also knew Joe Pesci from their early days around the Newark, NJ music scene, and references to both men's careers are sprinkled throughout the "Sopranos", including mention of the Four Seasons biographical Broadway mega-hit 'Jersey Boys', which features the character of young Joe Pesci, who also was one of the musical's producers
Christopher's imitation of Joe Pesci from Jimmy Hollywood (1994), plus his muttered wish earlier that he wants to write a movie like Goodfellas (1990), are just two more of the many continuing references in "Sopranos" to the work of Pesci and Martin Scorsese as well as Cosa Nostra (Italian-American Mafia) overall.
When Michael Imperioli as Christopher says "I think it's broken" in regards to his foot, he is referencing his role as Spider in Goodfellas where he says the same thing.