Leandro Baldassare had a circuitous path to restaurateur. In 2010, after years of cooking in Canada and Italy, he started a business out of a basement in Toronto, making fresh pasta for restaurants. Six years later, when he outgrew the basement and found the Geary Avenue location he’s in now, a proper space for a production facility, he envisioned a mix of wholesale and retail, with a small lunch counter. Despite jumping through all the regulatory hoops, an arcane bylaw prevented the city from granting him a license to serve food. So he did it on the sly, announcing lunches through Instagram stories, operating as a pasta speakeasy until the licensing issues were sorted out. By that time, Famiglia Baldassare had grown a strong following, thanks as much to the illicit appeal (everyone loves a secret) as the no-frills presentation of ethereal, fresh pasta at a reasonable price. Offering a short menu of a couple daily pastas, pulled cheeses made on site, and a contorno, diners routinely queued for lunch in the tiny space. Before March 2020, revenue was split almost evenly between wholesale and restaurant, with a bit of retail. Here, Baldassare tells La Cucina Italiana how he’s adapted to current conditions.
Your lunch counter area had room for just a few tables. How have you reconfigured the space for this Covid era, to safely accommodate both retail and food service?
It’s a bit of a hybrid setup. Because not one revenue stream is enough to support the business, we need to maintain the retail store as well as serve lunch—a hard thing to do in such a small space. We sell lunch out of the garage door front window. A friend built a counter that I butted against the window from the inside. It’s almost like a food truck. People come up to the window and order lunch. But it’s completely separate from the retail store. And we only let one person in the store at a time. So there’s two lines. One to go into the store and do your retail shopping. And one to buy lunch and take it away.
Are you strictly pick-up or are you using any third-party delivery platforms?
One of the hardest decisions we make is to not engage with delivery. I don’t think there’s anything we can make, in terms of a hot pasta dish, that would do well on the back of a bicycle for 40 minutes.
Do customers understand that?
I’ve never felt so supported by a group of people. And then, I’ve never felt so much complaining at the same time, about everybody wanting exactly what they want, and how they want it.
Leandro Baldassarre
How do diners react to the explanation that the average third party delivery company takes a 30% commission, which is higher than your profit margin?
Some people understand it. Some say raise your prices and suck it up. If I had a burger joint or a pizza joint, I would engage in these things and just raise my prices. But for me and the product that I do, it suffers. And maybe it’s a bit of ego. But I worked really hard, my entire life and career, to get to the point where I could put out a product that I’m so proud of. To put that out there, at 50% of its quality. Then the 30% cut on top of that. And then we’ve got to raise our price. Now I’m selling something at 30% more, and it’s at a reduced quality. At that point, my integrity’s gone.
What happens to a plate of fresh pasta during the delivery process?
Number one, the plating structure. Once you slap it in a container and it goes on the back of a bike and flips on to its side, the esthetic quality is completely gone. The second thing is, the ticking clock of diminishing quality. There’s no better example of a tagliatelle in bianco. So a butter sauce with truffles. It’s one of the flagship items we’ve done here. It’s one of those dishes you want to eat pretty quick while everything is still fluid and creamy. As soon as that thing is plated, and the temperature drops, the butter, the starch, everything starts to congeal. And that mouthfeel, the velvety silkiness, what makes it such a grand and beautiful thing to eat, within six minutes, is gone. It becomes cold, pasty noodles with congealed butter and a bunch of cold shavings of truffle on top. It won’t taste terrible. But is it special? No.
On the flip side of that, what kind of dishes, particularly in this endless Covid winter, have stood up well under takeout conditions?
We thrive on winter dishes. We’ve really leaned into the minestra, the hot, caloric, wet dishes of colder weather Italy. So tortellini in broth, lasagna. Heavier dishes that really hold on to the heat well and that don’t have a structure that has to be maintained. And then we did the really heavy bean dishes. Pasta fagioli with pig snout. So braised white beans with lots of carrots, onion, celery. We braised the pig snouts in there. Once they get tender we chop it up and put it back in. And we serve that with our fresh extruded tubes, like maccheroncini. Another one is a traditional dish from the province of Cremona, called Fasulin de l’öc cun le Cudeghe, which is braised black-eyed peas with pork rinds. It’s sticky and salty and creamy. Or pasta with lentils and cotechino, another typical wintery dish.
What are people hungry for these days?
Something works for two weeks and then it stops working. And you’ve got to figure something else out. It might have a lot to do with the up and down instability throughout the pandemic. Buying patterns are very weird. This time last year I was selling a skid of bread flour a week. I don’t think that’s ever going to happen again. It’s an anomaly. And it’s a cascade of anomalies over and over again.