It’s been a long time since Montreal’s Nora Gray and Elena operated with “business as usual.”
After a flood in 2019, Nora Gray had only been reopened a short while before needing to close down due to Covid-19 in spring of 2020. Co-owner Emma Cardarelli was still on maternity leave.
Like many restaurants, the restaurants survived the pandemic through a mix of meal kits, takeout, delivery, prepared foods, and retail. Now that Montreal restaurants can serve customers again, Cardarelli is thrilled to say goodbye to most of these services. Though the pizzeria Elena will continue with takeout and delivery, as well as a basement café converted into a retail space for frozen pizza, jarred tomato sauce, hot chili oil, honey, Caesar dressing, and other items, Nora Gray ditched delivery as soon as they could seat diners on the patio.
Some of the dishes at Montreal's Nora Gray.
Before launching her own business, Cardarelli was head chef at the Liverpool House (a part of the Joe Beef empire). After a lifetime in the kitchen, she now spends her days applying for subsidies and loans. Our conversation is repeatedly cut short by calls from the CRA, as Cardarelli gathers documentation for funds that will enable her to build a pizza storage room. Currently, the biggest problem at Elena is capacity. The pizza dough takes up so much space in the walk-in fridge, they need a whole extra room for it.
What kind of Italian restaurant is Nora Gray?
We started out Nora Gray in 2011 when the style of Italian food we do didn’t exist in Montreal. Your old red-sauce joint or your veal chop with mushroom sauce, the white tablecloth, and waiters with bowties. That was the only thing in Montreal for Italian food. When we left Joe Beef, my business partners and I wanted to do something like we’d seen in New York, which was like Italian in Italy as opposed to North American-style Italian. Local ingredients as much as possible.
How much of your ingredients are Canadian?
Everything now is from Quebec or Canada. At this stage, we’re even using Quebec mozzarella. We’re using Quebec flour. We still get burrata from Italy. Unfortunately, the burrata production in Canada is not great.
Did you try the one from [name redacted because I’m not trying to shame a local producer]?
Yeah. We tried and used it for a while. There’s no comparison. But everything else.
Fresh pasta, as I’ve heard from every Italian restaurateur in the last year, does not travel well in a sealed container. What was your alternative to that?
We tried to used more robust pastas, like orecchiette and cavatelli. Pastas that are already toothsome so if you undercook them a little bit they cook a little bit more in transit.
Now that you can seat guests in your dining room, what are you most excited to serve again?
Things like tagliatelle, which if you do it properly should be quite thin. All the long, thin pastas. Tagliatelle is a perfect example of something that needs to be very delicate and it does not transfer well. It will turn into a big gloopy glob. I would say a nice tagliatelle with mushrooms is something that’s simple but delicious. You can only experience the true essence of the dish sitting there, having it three minutes after it gets out of the pan.
Amaro and blueberry tart from Montreal's Nora Gray
How do you feel about having people in the restaurant again?
It’s exciting. It’s fun. It feels like normal. More normal than running around chasing after meal kits. It’s a lot less stressful for me. It feels nice to have people in the dining room. The chatter. The newness of it has already passed. Because we’ve been doing it now for a month.
After a year without customer interaction, do you or your staff feel rusty?
For service skills, because I had a baby, I’ve been out of service for almost three years. I’ve been a little rusty. I’ll probably never work on the line again. Socially, there have been some awkward moments. It happens on both sides, with the customers and with us.
What’s an example of an awkward moment?
I spent one night talking to a couple. I stood next to their table the whole night. At one point I said, “I’m going to leave you, because I’m sure you want to enjoy each other’s company.” And they were both like, “No. Stay. We’ve had enough of each other.” So that was funny.