Becoming essential:
A new business model for restaurants
“In N.D.G., during the first few weeks of the pandemic, people were going nuts because they couldn’t find flour or yeast. Even now, honestly, I sell so much flour that I don’t know what people are doing with it,” said Pasta Casareccia owner Mauro Petraccone about one of his most popular grocery items.
“The first couple of days, I had a bunch of yeast and there were these people on this N.d.g.-related Facebook page, saying that they couldn’t find any, so I gave a bunch of it away. Then, when it was time to reorder, I decided to start selling yeast.”
Pasta Casareccia is an Italian trattoria with a deli and store that has been serving local, loyal fans out of its Sherbrooke Street West location for 35 years. It started selling regular grocery items as soon as its owner saw the lineups — and food shortages — at local grocery stores.
The restaurant actually started off as a simple deli counter, Petraccone said, so the recent changes have it returning to its roots.
“Over the years, we expanded into a full restaurant while maintaining a full store,” he explained. “Now, the restaurant has gone away and the takeout side has expanded. The front dining room looks like a grocery store. I put in a fridge and I’m selling milk, bacon, eggs, bananas and whole chickens — all kinds of things.”
To find out what’s available on any given day, customers have taken to calling or direct-messaging Petraccone first.
“It’s sort of like the old days with your local grocer,” he said. “The truth is, I’m not going to retire on the money I make selling flour because it’s not that much of a margin. But we’ve been here for 35 years and I’ve been serving a lot of my customers since I was a kid, so we’re trying to help out. I’d rather have the grocery store than nothing, and I feel badly for those restaurants that haven’t been able to reopen. We’ve been very fortunate.”
For both the new items and traditional takeout favourites (including rigatoni, fettuccine, tagliatelle, gnocchi and agnolotti), customers can order over the phone and do pickup. Menu items are available for delivery via Uber Eats.
In the Villeray neighbourhood, Moccione is another fortunate restaurant that pivoted to change its business model. It now offers customers groceries, as well as takeout, making itself essential.
“We reinvented ourselves in terms of our offer; we still offer the same quality as before but we tweaked it so that it’s more approachable,” said chef and coowner Luca Cianciulli, who runs Moccione with his partner, coowner Maxime Landry.
“We also converted the inside so that the two people we can hold at a time have access to our wine. We’re providing 80 per cent of the restaurant experience with the food and wine; the last 20 per cent, you can create at home.”
Since officially reinventing itself and reopening on April 30, Moccione is selling privately imported cider, beer and wine — including sparkling wine, rosé, vin de liqueur and vin de voile — plus a variety of favourite menu items for takeout.
The new grocery offering includes many of the ingredients necessary to recreate some of their favourites at home, like bottled extra virgin olive oil from Spain, as well as tomato sauce, fresh pasta (maccheroni, fusilli and torchietti), fresh lasagna, frozen bolognese and polpettes, sausages, rilletes de canard, anchovies in oil, and tiramisu — all homemade.
They’re also selling a variety of cheeses, including buffalo mozzarella, Parmigiano and pecorino.
Moccione is “a small neighbourhood restaurant that took off really quickly and had kind of gone astray from the local vibe,” Cianciulli said. “We had reservations from Toronto and New York, and while we felt very blessed, it wasn’t the initial plan. Now, we’re seeing how the people from the area are the true, loyal customers. It’s becoming a restaurant de quartier the way we hoped it would be from the beginning.”
Since reconfiguring and transitioning from a 24-seat restaurant to what it is now, Cianciulli has been able to hire his crew back, for which he’s grateful.
“At any given moment it can go from 20 to 100 orders, so the volume we’re doing now is more than it was before. It’s motivating for my people,” he said.
“I think we’re like a psychological cushion that’s quite necessary, actually. Restaurants are in our DNA, at this point, and there’s comfort in eating food that’s been made by someone else. Moccione is totally different than it was before; there’s a dynamic that I really like, but I want to see how it goes. So far, people’s reaction has been great.”