Jul. 28, 2010 - Issue #771: Young at Heart

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Northern Italy

Twenty-five years on, Saccomanno's move still looks like a good one

Valentine's Day, 1985. The weather is unseasonably mild. The film Witness occupies top spot at the box office. Bryan Adams and Madonna dominate the airwaves with "Run to You" and "Like a Virgin," respectively. Peter Lougheed is premier. And somewhere, north beyond the perpetually busy Yellowhead Trail, tucked in behind the CN rail yard, the winter air is touched with tomatoes and basil.

Today, the Italian grocery store-café Saccomanno's is offering free spaghetti with tomato sauce. The business cut its teeth in retail in Little Italy, eventually moved north to larger quarters, and added a café. Its new home is nestled in the transition zone between the neighbourhoods of Killarney and Lauderdale, which are scarcely known for their breadth and depth of food-related businesses. The move is a gamble, but the spaghetti's siren song is irresistible. A mass exodus begins as CN staff migrate across the road and soon the tiny, 300 square foot dining room is packed.

Twenty-five years later, Joe Saccomanno gazes proudly over a much-expanded café and a retail section that boasts a dizzying array of cold cuts and cheeses and Mediterranean staples like pasta, olives and canned tomatoes. The son of Calabrian immigrants, he muses at the magnitude of change experienced by the building over the past decades. "When we started here, nothing was commercial in our kitchen. We had a stove and microwave like you have at home."

Today, Saccomanno's includes an open dining room with a long counter, a massive flat screen TV, and clusters of square tables with comfortable chairs. A pasta machine cranks out supple, golden noodles of many shapes. A cooler sparkles with bubbly spring water, chinotto and limonata. Lengths of sausage and wheels of cheese are displayed like precious artifacts in a glass cooler.

"When we expanded the restaurant part, we diminished the retail section," Joe explains. "We started with sandwiches and different kinds of pasta, which are really popular with the people from the CN buildings. Now we serve veal or chicken parmigiana, lasagna, cannelloni, salads and pizza."

Saccomanno's pizzas have amassed a multi-generational following. As part of a school lunch program, scores of six-inch pizzas are supplied to schools in the area. Hoards of voracious soccer fans crowded the café during the World Cup, their appetites for pizza as fervent as their devotion to the "beautiful game." Though the likes of Cannavarro and Gattuso have yet to discover Saccomanno's, Edmonton-born Oiler Fernando Pisani is known to frequent this spot.

The retail section brims with Canada-grown apples and tomatoes when they are in season. Joe notes that those who still make tomato sauce the traditional way—simmering the crimson orbs with olive oil and basil over gentle heat—covet these tomatoes.

Saccomanno's also sells winemaking supplies. Although the concept of winemaking carries with it an aura of complexity commensurate with PhD-level chemistry, Joe remarks that making wine at home is not nearly as difficult as one might imagine. He adds that good quality grape juice makes the difference.

It was indeed a gamble to move outside the city's geographic hot spot of all things gastronomical. Much has changed since that mild February day in 1985, though, when a tiny home-style kitchen produced volumes of spaghetti for the masses. Cooking equipment evolved, spaces renovated and clientele diversified. Joe continues to enjoy his rapport with the regular customers, and ponders another expansion. This time, he muses, it might be a second location in the city's southwest. It is an area of exponential growth, both in terms of population base and businesses, but locally owned ventures are rare. Perhaps, like the aroma of spaghetti and tomato sauce that wooed diners on the north side, the inhabitants of the southwest will find prosciutto and parmigiano-reggiano at their doorstep. V

SaccomanNo's
10208 - 127 Ave
780.478.2381
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