That’s Amore

Whenever I have lunch at Terroni Adelaide, the sprawling Italian restaurant in the old York County Courthouse in downtown Toronto, I order the ciccio, a folded pizza filled with prosciutto, arugula, tomatoes, and fior di latte — a creamy type of mozzarella. “That’s served cold, you know,” the wait staff inevitably say, with knowing smirks. “Yes,” I reply. “You mention that every time I order it.”

With a baker’s dozen locations, including two outposts in Southern California, Terroni is known, at least in my circle, for having a bit of attitude. “No modifications and no substitutions,” its website warns would‑be diners — a policy that has always struck me as discordant with a Beverly Hills clientele. And pity the uninitiated rube who asks for tartar sauce with their Frittura di pesce e frutti di mare. “If you want a sauce with this, you belong to the group of people who try to order a steak well-done — you’re in the wrong restaurant and will be offered a pizza,” Cosimo Mammoliti writes in a beautiful book that’s half recipes and half storytelling and entirely filled with passion. “(We’re not kidding, it happens all the time!)”

La Cucina di Terroni does not include the backstory of my beloved ciccio, although in one of several Q&As with former staff members, the television host Jessica Allen mentions that it’s also one of her highlights. This inviting, lusciously visual volume does bring to life scores of other dishes, from Uovo sbattuto con caffé (Whipped egg with espresso) to Fiorentina stile Terroni (Florentine steak, Terroni-style). It even includes a section on leftovers. With each recipe, Mammoliti offers a brief but enriching account of how that dish landed on his menu, how he and his loyal team have sourced the finest possible ingredients for it, and how it’s evolved (or not) since he and his business partner, Paolo Scoppio, opened their first piccolo negozio — or small shop — on Queen Street West in late 1992.

Mammoliti and Scoppio meant to call that initial outpost I due terroni — the Two Peasants. By doing so, they would reclaim a northern Italian slur for a poor person from the south, a person who was “from the dirt.” But an antiques dealer from across the street convinced them otherwise. A one-word name was “catchier,” he assured them.

That antiques dealer, Bernie, is one of many characters who add literary texture to La Cucina di Terroni, not unlike Emmet Argentine and company in Antanas Sileika’s novel The Seaside Café Metropolis. An improbable Soviet restaurateur who learned his way around a kitchen at the Royal York Hotel before immigrating to postwar Lithuania with his socialist mother, Argentine is tasked by a well-connected architect to “create atmosphere — to make the customers happy” in a bright space that “felt not exactly like Toronto, but maybe better, more like New York.” With each chapter, Argentine details how he brought the architect’s dream to life, while navigating a KGB presence and, often, a lack of ingredients for specific dishes, the recipes for which are included. Some of these directions are rather spare. In its entirety, the one for Pheasant Under Glass reads, “This is a ridiculous idea. Do not attempt to do this. A glass dome can break easily in the kitchen, and the sight of the dish will enrage socialists.” Others, like those for Tree Cake and Mushroom Trumpets, are more detailed and amusing.

The charm of the wry novel lies in its origin story, which Sileika sketches in an afterword. During the “brief Khrushchev thaw” of the late 1950s, there really was a surprisingly stylish restaurant in Vilnius, the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, where jazz was played and poets met. “Neringa was a very smart café, with a huge dining room and mosaics with a seaside theme, a middle section with a bar and fountain, and an intimate and charming street-front section,” Sileika writes of a place he first encountered in the summer of 1975. “Not at all like the grimy train station cafés I had passed through in provincial Poland and the USSR.”

Hundreds of kilometres from the nearest shore, the fictionalized Seaside Café Metropolis brings to mind the Rick’s of Casablanca combined with the Tropicana of I Love Lucy. While some of the characters that populate the place come straight from central casting — the band members, the doormen, the informants, and Argentine’s “four bohemians” among them — the overall concept is a good one. In a place of scarcity, the novel asks, how does one reimagine “working man’s food” like Riga sprats or buckwheat groats? How does one gather ingredients for elevated cuisine?

On multiple occasions, Mammoliti mentions how difficult it is to come by fresh octopus in Toronto —“next to impossible.” It’s that scarcity that led to a popular menu item, Calamarata al sugo di polpo (Calamarata with octopus sauce). “I remember cooking this dish many, many years ago on a summer night in Toronto at Paolo’s house,” Mammoliti writes. “I cooked the whole octopus with a lot of olive oil over low heat for a little less than an hour.” When he finally opened the pot’s lid, he panicked: there wasn’t enough to go around because the mollusc had shrunk so much. He took what he had and improvised: “What a wonderful mistake! The result is a delicious seafood sauce that gets soaked up with those hearty calamarata noodles.”

Like Emmet Argentine’s Cold War kitchen, Terroni has been a place of resourcefulness and, at times, rivalry. For years, chefs at the individual restaurants put their own spin on a classic tiramisu, which used to be served in those plastic containers meant for banana splits. “You would think everyone would just follow our main set recipe,” Mammoliti writes, “but it became a serious competition between locations. Some had a heavier hand, some put more mascarpone, some added more chocolate.”

In a surprising number of cases — especially given that Terroni is known for refusing to slice a pizza — a certain amount of ease and individuality is encouraged in these pages. “I personally like to use short ribs, but my mom used to make it with all kinds of cuts,” Mammoliti says of Sugo della domenica (Sunday sauce). “You could probably do it with any kind of pasta,” he concedes of Frittata di spaghetti. “You gather up all your leftover cold cuts and cheeses, cut them up into little cubes, and mix them with mashed potatoes, eggs, milk or cream, and put it all into a casserole dish,” he instructs in another recipe, which even I find manageable. But as Terroni has expanded over the years — and launched Sud Forno, its own bakery — more consistency if not conformity has been required. (No substitutions!)

In 2019, Mammoliti and his team opened Spaccio, an industrious nonna’s answer to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Occupying a former sound studio just east of downtown Toronto, the 16,000-square-foot facility now makes a lot of what’s served across the city: “all our pastries, all our biscotti, all our restaurant desserts, all our bread, all our pizza dough, butchery, gelato, all our five-hour sauces, all our pastas, and five thousand panettone at Christmastime.” The iconic holiday cake, it turns out, provides a baker’s “most stressful period” and is a “losing game” from a business perspective (apparently cannoli are also a nightmare for the bean counters). It requires so much time, so much planning, and it “tends to take over everything in its path.”

But even within the mechanized confines of Spaccio, with its handful of tables and my favourite cacio e pepe in town, innovation is possible. The chief panettone maker, Luca Rotatori, used to show up at 3 a.m. to check on his finicky dough starter. He has since installed a camera, so that he can monitor his lievito madre from the comfort of his bed.

High-tech gadgetry is a far cry from the small Queen Street shop with a handful of stools, a foosball table, and Mammoliti’s father making thirty to forty kilograms of sausage per week using an old hand-cranked machine (Spaccio churns out 453 kilograms per week these days). But it’s clear from reading La Cucina di Terroni that much remains the same: an emphasis on quality, community, family, tradition, craft. It’s admirable how a high school dropout has built Terroni — with the help of many, but through heartbreak and health scares — into an exemplar verging on an empire. This may be his cookbook, but it transcends cooking and Toronto alike. It’s written in “a generous love language of food and culture,” to quote the designer Bruce Mau, who credits the original location with saving his life. It’s also more than enough to make up for the snark the next time I order that cold, folded pizza.