‘THE GRANO OF ITS DAY’
A landmark for decades, Angelo’s on Chestnut St. gave many Torontonians their first taste of Italian cuisine. Once Upon a City,
In 1921, Clelia Bollo and Angelo Belfanti, both Italian immigrants to Toronto, purchased a rambling threestorey hotel/tavern at the corner of Chestnut and Edward Sts. Like so many newcomers to the city, they wanted to start a business.
Bollo had emigrated from the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy in the1880s as child. She married a Bracebridge tannery worker and the couple had two children, but the First World War left her a widow. When she remarried Belfanti a few years after the armistice, the couple decided to open a small restaurant, and the brick structure at 144 Chestnut St. seemed to be the perfect spot.
For many years, Italians arriving to Toronto had settled in the row houses and cottages around Elm and Chestnut Sts. (now the site of the University of Toronto’s dental faculty). While the local residents included a mix of Eastern European Jews and Chinese immigrants, that intersection was known for its Italian green grocers and bakeries. A cigar maker named Edward Pasquale had a shop across the street.
The hotel building, according to McGill University historian John Zucchi, dated to the mid-1880s, when the Glionnas, an Italian family of street musicians from New York, came to Toronto and built a saloon and boarding house on that corner. But the Glionnas’ tavern eventually went out of business and the building had been empty for several years when Bollo and Belfanti put up the down payment.
They wanted to create an authentic Italian eatery with a mix of style, homeyness and fine cooking. The two dining rooms, separated from one another by a door and a few steps, were decorated with a (then) unusual terrazzo floor, inlaid with large chunks of smooth, coloured marble.
A beaded curtain, said to be the first of its kind in Toronto, separated the two rooms, which were filled with round tables and checkered tablecloths. Bollo and Belfanti decorated the walls with paintings of Italian dishes and aphorisms (e.g., “Tell me what you eat / I’ll tell you who you are”). The extended family lived upstairs.
It didn’t take long for Angelo’s, as the restaurant was called, to forge a reputation as the city’s premiere Italian trattoria and quite possibly the first place many Torontonians of that era ever encountered dishes such as ravioli, spaghetti with meatballs and spumoni.
“This was the Grano of its day,” Parkdale artist Flavio Belli, who is Clelia’s grandson, said recently, referring to one of the fixtures of North Toronto’s restaurant scene. Indeed, in an acknowledgment of that gastronomical lineage, Grano owner Roberto Martella has an original framed Angelo’s menu hanging on the wall of his own family-run eatery.
Relaxing recently in an art-filled apartment in a sprawling 19th-century mansion near King St. W. and Roncesvalles Ave., Belli thumbed through a box brimming with old photos of the restaurant and the surrounding neighbourhood — a working-class immigrant community that was gradually wiped off the map in the 1950s.
The images reveal a building adorned with cheerful window awnings and a gabled mansard roof that conferred an aura of Victorian elegance. A garage entrance along the Edward St. wall had been closed over to create an additional dining room. Several pictures show the owners, the family, and Angelo’s wait staff posing on the benches out front, where the restaurant spilled onto a generous and languid stretch of sidewalk. “It was so popular,” Belli says, “they put picnic tables in the back” — for eating “all’aperto,” or in the open air, as Martella adds.
While junkyards, taverns, dodgy hotels and the bus station were situated in that part of “The Ward,” as the area around Angelo’s was known, the community had an intimate and generally safe feel, says Belli’s sister Adrienne McConnachie, who lived above the restaurant from the early 1940s until her parents bought a home in a new subdivision in Etobicoke a decade
later. “The city street was our playground.”
Despite those neighbourhood connections, Angelo’s also functioned as a kind of cultural destination, offering up flavourful cooking, good wine and a bit of European sophistication in a city that tended to frown on such pleasures.
A famously imperious waitress named Rosina — “you could determine the state of the pasta from her look,” artist Harold Towne recalled years later — provided an air of exoticism.
When they swung through Toronto to perform in venues such as Shea’s Hip-
podrome, stars like Edward G. Robinson, Boris Karloff and Lucille Ball patronized Angelo’s. (Celebrities signed framed publicity photos as well as Bollo’s autograph book, but Belli says the leather-bound album has been lost.)
During his short and unhappy stint as a Toronto Star reporter, Ernest Hemingway was also said to be a customer, dropping in during the early 1920s to drink whiskey served in a teacup. According to a biographer, Group of Seven painter Fred Varley also came in regularly, especially for the Chianti. Describing one of many boozy evenings, a reporter noted that Varley, after polishing off his first bottle, would declare, “Let’s begin drinking, shall we?”
In 1947, another local paparazzo captured Canadian figure skating champion Barbara Ann Scott dining at Angelo’s during a visit. “I love the spaghetti,” she told a reporter, “and if it puts weight on me, well, it’s worth it.”
The restaurant also attracted the attention of artists Albert Franck and John Reppen, both of whom painted images of and for Angelo’s.
“This is Toronto’s original restaurant famed for Italian food and still the favour,” Globe and Mail food columnist Mary Walpole wrote in a 1953 where Angelo’s is listed alongside venerable establishments like the King Edward.
Yet such expressions of public acceptance — as well as the restaurant’s commercial popularity among the Toronto’s early foodies — represented hard-won victories in a city where the media, the police and many residents blithely equated Italian surnames with the Mafia and organized crime.
In 1940, with the outbreak of war in Europe, someone detonated two home-
made bombs near Angelo’s. A few months later, federal authorities arrested Belfanti and sent him to a detention camp in Petawawa amidst fears of fascist organizing (he was released unconditionally a year later). “He was a personality in the city, and they were trying to send a message about that,” says Belli.
Angelo’s postwar heyday proved to be relatively short-lived, however. The restaurant closed in1957 after the city expropriated the property; the row houses along Chestnut, Edward and Elm Sts. were also demolished to make way for office and institutional buildings; presently, there’s nothing on the site to acknowledge the presence of the restaurant and the Italian-Canadian community it anchored.
Bollo and Belfanti both died in the 1960s, but members of their extended families opened and managed several other Italian-themed eateries elsewhere in Toronto and Thorold, Ont., including Old Angelo’s, which operated briefly on Elm St.
The original Angelo’s, reflects Martella, “is an example of the richness of Toronto. Alot of people arrive and can’t share their culture linguistically, but they can share it culinarily or gastronomically. And that continues to this day.”