Pasta Factory Turns Eatery
You might have unintentionally passed on this pasta experience if you weren’t seeking it out. The unassuming spot on Geary Avenue, tucked within a large brick industrial-looking building, has just a small sign on the door. It’s fitting because, with only a handful of tables, they wouldn’t be able to accommodate massive crowds anyway.
But that hasn’t stopped people from lining up to get a taste of Famiglia Baldassarre’s creations. And between 80 to 100 people can also enjoy traditional Italian lunches, four days a week.
Owner Leandro Baldassarre, 35, calls the team "pasta-makers and manufacturers." What started in 2010 as a solo venture, renting a space to meet his wholesale orders, has since grown into a multifaceted business.
The spot serves as a small pasta factory that also sells retail goods and operates as an eatery. Baldassarre says what they make daily depends on orders, but generally, it’s anywhere from 50 to 150 kilograms per day of pasta production.
Some of their specialties include tagliatelle, ravioli, tortellini and cappellacci (another form of stuffed pasta) — to name a few. If you head there on Wednesday, you’ll likely see a plate of cavatelli.
“Those are the ones we specialize in and do very well,” Baldassarre says. They also make more typical types of pasta such as rigatoni, bigoli and spaghettoni.
Early in the morning, a small team, including Leandro's brother Nick, is making many of these traditional fresh Italian kinds of pasta come to life by hand.
Baldassarre says the setting and the place are small. But the excitement is likely due to its unique location (in addition to the mouth-watering traditional dishes.)
“It’s an interesting experience because we’re not really a restaurant. We’re basically a pasta factory you can sit down and eat in while you watch us do our thing,” Baldassarre says, adding that it can be a powerful experience to have the connection of watching your food being prepared from scratch.
“It’s not an open kitchen for the sake of being a gimmick. I’ve always had a pasta factory, and I just moved locations and just opened the doors to the public.”
And the public is interested not only in the physical space, but also its online one. Baldassarre has racked up 37,000 followers on Instagram who are fascinated by the "behind-the-scenes" peek into his passion.
Part of what got him hooked on sharing was receiving messages from the public saying they learned a lot seeing the amazing process of how he makes pasta. He says that instant feedback inspires him to “keep going, keep posting and showing people my side of the culinary world, where I live in my head.”
Baldassarre’s love for traditional Italian fare goes deep into his roots. His entire family is Italian; his grandparents immigrated to Canada after the Second World War. He grew up eating and loving Southern Italian cuisine.
“It was always a big family Italian affair. I just took to food from a very young age, it was always extremely important to me, always very pleasurable.”
He loved it so much, he thought it couldn’t be possible to turn it into a career, but here he is, now capable of boasting the official title of Pastaio — one who makes pasta.
Baldassarre worked in restaurants for years, but was more focused on eclectic fine dining. It wasn’t until he moved to Italy that he started zeroing in on that cuisine. He spent three years in the province of Mantova, in a town called Canneto sull' Oglio. That’s where he fell in love with the north, where he says the dialect and food were utterly different than that with which he grew up.
But the feeling of hospitality, tradition, living a simple, humble life and pouring love and care into food “was exactly the same.”
There he did a lot of everything — pasta-making was just one piece of the puzzle.
“Salami-making, pasta-making, wine-making, traditional sweets and main-course dishes, everything you can think of,” he says, reflecting on the culinary adventure.
And that’s why Baldassarre is a bit of a stickler when it comes to tradition, boasting you would never sit down in his eatery and eat a meal that was “catch-all Italian food.”
“It has to make sense,” he says.
“You wouldn’t eat pumpkin ravioli and start off with fried calamari. They don’t belong together, and you would never see that in someone’s home in Italy at the table.”
That’s part of the experience Baldassarre and his team creates; it’s as if you’re sitting down at someone’s table in a region of Italy, served what would be eaten in that area.
“If you come to the shop, there will be days that are very northern Italian.”
Pumpkin tortelli from Mantova is one example of what they’ve served up. The dish is sweet and savoury at the same time, with lots of spices. Baldassarre describes it as pumpkin pie in a piece of pasta, covered in cheese.
“It’s a really weird combination, but the first time I tried it, it blew my socks off.”
One day you may be feasting on a northern Italian-inspired tagliolini with wild chanterelle mushrooms and butter. On another more southern-themed day, cavatelli with his grandmother’s sauce, or topped with rapini and anchovies alongside a serving of burrata cheese.
Baldassarre credits the popularity of some of his most simple dishes to the quality of ingredients.
For example, tagliatelle in bianco involves egg pasta, butter and parmesan.
It sounds simple, but the flour quality has to be front and centre, with the right protein content. It also has to be clean, so that the quality of the egg shows through the colour of the pasta. The perfect egg and flour combination will make for the best bounce and structure.
It also has to be rolled out just right, “So when you eat it, it’s velvety, your teeth sink in just enough, it tastes so homey,” Baldassarre says. “You don't want them to be dense and extruded like something that was dried.”
The structure is essential and that comes from the quality of the ingredients and the careful process of making it.
Once the pasta is ready to be tossed into boiling water, it’s salted perfectly and topped with high-quality butter and Parmigiano Reggiano DOP.
“It starts to cream together and create this quote, unquote sauce, but it’s not sauce, it’s the preparation. Once it comes together, it’s magic.”
Baldassarre says customers often ask if he sells that magical “white sauce,” and he will jokingly pull out a stick of butter and a piece of parmesan and say, “that’s the sauce.”
“It’s very simple in that sense, but the execution requires a lot of care and feel.”
Toronto can’t seem to get enough of these purveyors of fine pasta. Baldassarre attributes part of that popularity to the fact that they’re new, and Toronto likes new things. But he also thinks the Baldassarre crush isn’t going to go away any time soon.
“I think we’ll stay busy. I think that we do something unique. We’re very specialized and very good at what we do. The amount of pedigree we have in pasta-making and Italian food is beyond a lot of places.”
Famiglia Baldassarre
122 Geary Ave., Toronto, Ont.
famigliabaldassarre.com| 647.293.5395 @famiglia_baldassarre
