ITALIAN RESTAURANT IN FORT LANGLEY KEEPS IT AUTHENTIC AND DELICIOUS
Giulia Carbone was on a mission to share the simple, delicious flavours of Italy with the Fraser Valley. And Mangia e Scappa was how she planned to do it.
“The whole inspiration behind the restaurant was to share my family’s traditions with everybody,” she says.
At her business, the former interior designer wanted to share her Italian heritage — her family hails from Cosenza in Calabria — and flavours with Fort Langley, so she started with a small market in Gasoline Alley to showcase the fine food of her beloved country.
“I’ve always loved, in Italy, all the different products and the way people display the products, how they package them and the flavours,” she says. “There’s a uniqueness to it all. And that’s why I wanted to bring that to Canada and create that experience for people so they don’t necessarily have to travel to Italy in order to experience what Italy has to offer.”
But, it didn’t take too long before Carbone’s business was ready to expand.
“It was a tiny little closet, basically,” she says of her first shop. “I always joke with people and say that I’m out of the closet now.”
She opened the restaurant and market at its current location, just down the street and around the corner, in September 2015. And, in order to ensure her restaurant’s kitchen creations were true to Italy, she tapped Italian culinary talents to help her recreate authentic flavours in the Fraser Valley.
“I have one chef from Bologna that makes all the pasta and a chef from Rome who does all the breads and the pastries, and a
chef from Venice who designed the whole menu,” Carbone explains. “(Executive chef Alessandro Rampazzo) comes from an area called Vicenza, and it was all inspired by him and the area that he comes from, and also his traditional training.
“They all get along and they all bring in flavours from different regions.”
And what this mash-up of regional influences means for diners is truly unique Italian eats that emphasize simplicity.
“That’s what Italy is known for: its simplicity,” Carbone says. “You enjoy good quality without throwing so much into it.
“And everything is made inhouse.”
While the market element of Mangia e Scappa remains, and a coffee bar has been added, it’s the restaurant itself that is now the main attraction.
For Carbone, her top priority is keeping her dishes as close to what would be served on a table in Rome, Venice or Florence. And that all starts with the ingredients.
“I try to keep it as authentic as possible,” she says. “I fly in the burrata cheese and the buffalo (mozzarella) from Rome. The ingredients, in the end, do speak for themselves. And I think that is what keeps people coming back.
The restaurant also uses only 00 flour for its pastries, pastas and breads, rather than opting for readily available Canadian flours.
“I try to keep it strictly as Italian as possible,” she explains of her sourcing. “Other than fresh produce, where I try to support local farms. And the local butcher I use is an Italian butcher out in the country who is within 15 minutes of the restaurant called Bonetti’s.”
Our dinner visit kicked off with the insalata mista ($11), a simple green salad that was lightly dressed and tasty, if a tad drab. Mixed greens mingled with sliced onion, fennel and cherry tomatoes for a fresh introduction to the evening ’s meal. Bread e oil ($7), featuring house-baked slices of slightly sweet bread with oregano and olive oil, promptly followed the greens and provided a decent distraction until the main dishes arrived.
Carbone pointed to the eatery’s fettuccine al nero di seppia ($25) with lobster cream sauce, tiger prawns and baby shrimp, as well as the house-made gnocchi cremosa ($18) with Gorgonzola sauce, potato gnocchi, prosciutto and sprinkled walnuts as two favourites among diners. But our dinner party went for the rigatoni bolognese sauce ($18), which features a simple sauce of ground pork, beef, tomatoes, herbs and noodles made in-house by chef Sergio, who Carbone says also works on the pasta team at Nightingale Restaurant in Vancouver. The pasta was perfectly cooked al dente and each fat noodle proved a perfect vessel for the tasty sauce.
For pizza, it was all about the patate e pipi ($25).
“That was made by my son,” Carbone says proudly of the wood-fired pie that netted her teenage son Luca the third-place honour in the Vancouver Foodster Best Pizza Challenge in 2017. The pizza features a rich, fontina cream sauce and is topped with thinly sliced potatoes, rosemary, fire-roasted red peppers, garlic confit, pancetta and a fresh, handmade cheese.
“He dedicated that to his nona because my mom loves making roasted potatoes and roasted red peppers,” she says. “So, he thought of making that dish and created a pizza around it. So, it’s kind of neat.”
The pie offered an interesting flavour combination with the roasted red peppers, cheese, thinly sliced potatoes, pork and garlic. Lots of garlic. The delicious crust, with delicate blackened bubbles, was a treat and would be, on its own, worthy of a drive to Fort Langley to taste a few of the eatery’s other pies.
For dessert, we tried the pane cotta ($7) with caramel drizzle, which proved to be sweet and shareable; a pleasant after-dinner treat for two.
“The pane cotta is actually made by chef Alessandro,” Carbone explains of the sweet custard. “But all of our other desserts are made by chef Roberto from Rome.”
But, if you’re looking to wrap a meal at Mangia e Scappa with something a little more tart, order the lemon sorbet ($8), which is made all the more memorable by its vessel: a whole frozen lemon that serves as a makeshift bowl for the frozen, sweet sorbetto. Delizioso!