Canada has
been the coldest place I’ve visited in my life. So,
on this trip to Canada,
I went prepared with my long johns and heavy wool coat. I still froze.
 The
purpose of the trip was to learn more about the Canadian pizza market.
Since I’ve been at PMQ, I’ve worked on the U.S.
and Australian editions of the magazine. I’ve traveled to Italy
for the World Pizza Championship. With all the travel and talking with
different operators, each country and each region within a country
reveals a slightly different take on preparing and marketing pizza. The
people I talked to and stores I visited in Canada
were no different. Every place has its own story.
This
trip landed me in Toronto.
I made a few phone calls before leaving and asked what pizza places I
needed to see in Toronto.
Everyone I asked kept mentioning Dante’s Italian Restaurant.
They said, “They’ve got the best pizza in Toronto.”
We get calls from operators all the time about great food. The first
thing they say is, “I’ve got great food.”
Our response is, “Well, of course you have great food. What
are you doing to get the word out about your great food?”
No
Advertising?
I asked
my contacts a few of the regular questions about Dante’s such
as, “What kind of marketing do they do? Coupons, flyers,
billboards?” The response was “none of that, but
they have something like 30 drivers on a weekend night, and
they’ll deliver close to 20 miles away. Also, it’s
expensive, about $30 for a large pizza.” I decided I had to
check it out because I wanted to solve the mystery of how someone can
have 30 drivers, charge $30 for a pizza and not advertise?
 I set up
a dinner interview at the restaurant, and Lesley Greenberg took our
consulting editor, Tom Boyles, and I to check it out. The pizza was
truly fantastic, and after gorging ourselves on salad, veal Parmesan
and the best pepperoni pizza I’ve ever had, we chatted with a
waitress named Annette about her job there.
The
Story Develops
It
was
close to 10 p.m., and Annette said she was headed home to go to bed
because she would be back at five in the morning. I said,
“What on Earth do you mean? Five in the morning?!”
She said, “Yes, I come in and bread the veal for the day and
make the veal Parmesan.” She does this six days a week. She
also mentioned that her husband and two children worked there. I
started to put two and two together. Before I got to Toronto,
I knew Dante and his four brothers ran the restaurant, and now that I
had discovered a family working for a family. I saw a story developing.
All
About the Family
Dante
Paoletti, owner of the store, was finally able to pull himself away
from the stove to chat with us. He sat there, covered in tomato sauce,
with sweat dripping from his brow, and told us his story in a quiet,
reverent tone.
The
first thing I wanted to know was how there could possibly be that much
work to do that he had to have Annette come in at 5 a.m. Dante
surprised me further when he said, “My dad comes in at two or
three to bring in the fresh pasta we have made every day by a local
guy.” He then went on to say that there is someone there
almost 22 hours a day because everything is made from scratch, and they
only do enough prep for the day’s business. Dante then told a
tale of how a true family business works.
 Dante, a
first generation Italian immigrant, opened his store at the age of 18.
The only help he had was from his family: his mother and four brothers.
“My father worked two jobs to support the family, while my
mother raised five boys.” He says it isn’t always
easy working with his family because “when you have five
volatile Italians with five different personalities, it’s
hard. You can’t fire them because they’re
family.”
Dear old
Mom is who Dante credits for help when times were hard for the
business. When his brothers were angry about giving up their weekends
or their social lives to help with the business seven days a week,
their mom would say, “What do you have to complain about? You
either take care of each other or that’s it.”
 “My
mom kept us together,” Dante says. “When one of my
brothers didn’t want to work, my mom would be there. They say
in Italians, that the father is the backbone. It’s not true.
It’s the mom that holds the family together with her
sacrifices. In those times, my father worked two jobs to make it or you
were sent back to your home country. My mother was still waiting for
you at three o’clock in the morning to cook you something. To
me, she never slept. So, you learn those qualities; how strong it is to
be together.”
Getting
the Word Out
When
Dante first got started, his area was a mix of immigrants and not very
populated. “I started out with a small store with one oven,
one stove and one refrigerator,” he says. “We let
the area know about the restaurant by dropping menus on
residents’ doorsteps. You see fancy menus from other
places—we couldn’t do that because it was too
expensive. We couldn’t get a company to distribute the menu
because that was too expensive, so we did it ourselves. My brother was
twelve years old. I put him out in front of a building, and
he’d put them out. I said, ‘I’ll make you
something to eat afterward.’ But that’s what we
did. We paid the price for years.”
Everyone
Has a Job
Each of
the five brothers and father is responsible for different parts of the
operation. Dante is the ringleader, dedicating about 18 hours a day to
his restaurant. He comes in about 10 or 11 in the morning and spends
the lunch hours in front of the stove cooking what he calls
“the kitchen items,” which are the different pasta
and Italian dishes. The afternoons are spent doing inventory and
packaging his secret spices in plastic containers for his brother,
Enrico, to use in the prep area in the basement of the restaurant. In
the evenings, Dante is back at the stove cooking—a love he
learned from his mother.
Diego is
the front man. He mans the cash register, works the phones, and deals
with the bookkeeping side of the business. He’s out there
with the three girls they have on the phones when it’s busy.
Enrico is the “little general in the prep area.”
He’s responsible for getting produce in and ready for the day
as well as prepping the sauces.
Dante’s
other brothers Antonio and Marcello along with their father work in the
restaurant every day making dough and other prep and kitchen work.
After we
talked for a while, we found out that Dante works only with families to
make his food. He looks to local families and individuals to get his
products because he believes families care more about their products.
“It’s not just a business to them,” he
says. Most of his produce is bought from a local farmer’s
family. He has a local butcher clean and cut their veal every day as
well as grinds the beef they use in their meatballs and spaghetti
sauce. A local baker bakes the bread they serve in the restaurant fresh
each morning.
How the
Product is Made
We went
on a tour of Dante’s enormous restaurant, which is the anchor
of a small strip mall. The restaurant isn’t your typical
one-floor structure with a dining room, pickup area, delivery area and
kitchen. There are two floors. The upstairs is dedicated to the dining
room, the pickup counter and the kitchen. The refrigeration, the
freezers and the prep areas are downstairs. Everything in the kitchen
and prep area was designed to Dante’s needs.
He
opened up a walk-in cooler and showed us the pails used to store dough.
“The dough is cut off in slabs and run through a sheeter and
stacked on stainless steel trays, which we store in a specially
designed prep table upstairs,” Dante says. “The
dough is timed to be ready at peak hours. We use about seven pails of
dough per day.”
In the
kitchen everything goes in a circle. On the left side of the kitchen, a
salad area is set up with a refrigerator unit holding the ingredients.
The lettuce is weighed during prep and placed in plastic containers
that double as carryout boxes. They weigh all the salad ingredients for
consistency. Next to that is the prep table holding the dough and
toppings.
Next to
the ovens is a gas stove where Dante cooks all the “kitchen
items” like veal Parmesan. Beside that is the pasta heater.
“I had this designed to heat water at 193 to 197 degrees for
al dente pasta,” he says. I had a designer make small baskets
to hold individual servings of pasta. The machine skims the water
several times a day.”
Delivering
the Goods
In the
downstairs area of the restaurant is a waiting area for drivers. On a
busy night, there are 20 of them coming in and out. Dante only allows
his drivers to take one order at a time, but says the drivers probably
make more runs than other places because their business is 60 percent
delivery. The drivers are mostly part-time and get an hourly wage, plus
a delivery fee, which ranges from 50 cents to areas around the store to
$5 to $15 for far-away deliveries, which come from as far away as
downtown Toronto
or Mississauga.
“The drivers line up for the far-away orders because not only
do they get the fee, they also get a tip in most cases. Sometimes
they’ll make $30 in an hour.”
This led
to a discussion about his employees. Dante’s philosophy on
employees is to “treat them like human beings.” He
says, “I’m the boss, and I work harder than most of
my staff. The odd person who will take advantage of it will find their
way out. It’s the philosophy that’s always worked,
especially when you’re in a social type of business.
You’re always with people. If you treat your staff miserably,
your customers are going to see it. I sometimes hire people who
can’t speak English because I know that in time, as they get
better, they’re going to do a lot for us. It’s a
great philosophy that I learned from my mother.”
As you
can see with Dante’s, it is possible to use your food as your
marketing device, if it’s done right. The lesson to be
learned from Dante is that he treats each dish like he’s
serving it to his family. Each dish gets time and care just like a
family member, and his customers know that. That’s why they
don’t mind paying $30 for a pizza.
–
PMQ –
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