Italian Cuisine – Diners from across Calgary venture into enclaves to sample food from faraway land
When Gene Cioni opened Calgary’s first Italian restaurant – Gene’s Spaghetti Parlour – in 1949, he hedged his bets.
As written in the book Spaghetti Western by his daughter Maria Cioni, he opened it at 111 4th Street N.E., on the edge of Calgary’s largely Italian Riverside (now Bridgeland) community, but within a stone’s throw of Calgary’s bustling downtown.
Cioni knew that interest in Italian food was growing in the nonItalian population and, with the city in the midst of another oil boom, the economy was looking good.
But Cioni also wanted to stay close to his Italian neighbourhood, to the people he thought would be his main customers. So the spot just north of the river seemed to straddle both the Italian community and the business centre.
His idea proved very successful, enough so that, within a few years, he had moved his Italian restaurant to a larger spot on the then-western edge of the city, to the end of a potholed gravel road near the Shaganappi Golf Course and the Calgary Gun Club. By then, Calgarians of all stripes were clamouring for his Italian food. A trip to the outskirts just added to the mystique, making Cioni’s La Villa Supper Club one of the hottest tickets in town in the 1950s.
Cioni was following one of the main patterns of culinary immigration and integration. In a simplified form it goes like this: A large number of Italian immigrants arrive from a faraway country. Knowing little of the local language and looking for cultural familiarity, they settle close to one another. Quickly, entrepreneurs open shops that sell foods and materials from the homeland. And soon, a restaurant or two opens to serve the needs of the community.
Adventurous diners from across the city venture into the cultural enclave to sample the wares. They report back to their friends and more ‘outsiders’ arrive, bumping up business. In time, entrepreneurs may move or open a second location in the city’s business centre or ‘outsider’ community, expanding the clientele, and helping connect their community to the broader population.
The highest density of restaurants and businesses associated with that culture will typically remain in the neighbourhood, but the food will spread throughout the city. In Calgary, this pattern applies to the two cultural enclaves – Chinatown and Bridgeland – that date to the early 1900s and to the development of many local Chinese and Italian restaurants.
Other cultures have followed a different pattern here. When Rom and Sue Anand wanted to open an Indian restaurant in Calgary in 1974, the Indian community was so small they did not have the benefit of an identifiable enclave in which to locate their business. So the Anands chose a location on the high-traffic 16th Avenue N., a spot that they hoped would be close enough to downtown, the Foothills Hospital and the University of Calgary to attract customers to them. “We were looking for the professors and engineers, the doctors and students to come to Omar Khayyam,” says Rom Anand. It worked.
They had effectively skipped the incubation step of growing in a familiar community and went directly to the larger community around them. And they helped pave the way for generations of Indian restaurateurs to come.
John Manzo, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Calgary and an avid foodie, explains this phenomenon.
“If there is no identifiable community and someone wants to open a restaurant from another culture, they have no choice but to open in other areas. Take Vietnamese,” he says. “Vietnamese noodle shops and pho houses are all over the city, not just in one small area. It helps make us the most integrated city in North America.
“If a Vietnamese noodle house is just down the street, we try it out. Then Vietnamese cuisine becomes routine and normal. We don’t think twice about having a bowl of noodles or a Vietnamese sub sandwich for lunch. Just like curry and chips in Britain, it becomes part of what we eat.”
Dining on other cultures helps integrate the entire community too. As we gain familiarity with other people’s foods and the way they eat them and barriers drop and we become more comfortable with each other. Cultures collide – in a good way – and a new culture is created.
Manzo mentions something else that happens in these circumstances. “The food changes. It might be the surroundings and it might be a generational thing, but there will be a Canadian spin put on the food.”
Like the Vietnamese sandwich or curry and chips, the food is always evolving.
He also adds, “There’s no point complaining that the food doesn’t taste like it did wherever. The question is whether or not it tasted good.”
Good-tasting food is also what Term Chanhao was aiming for when he and his family opened Thai Sa-On in 1990.
“There were only 50 to 60 Thai people in Calgary back then,” says Chanhao. “So we needed to attract Calgarians who had never had Thai food before. We served Royal Thai cuisine, which looks good on the plate and has a medium level of spicing.”
So, instead of focusing the food on one region of Thailand, they opted for a crowd-pleasing best-of menu. Today, even though the Thai community still numbers only a few hundred, we have an abundance of Thai restaurants throughout the city. In twenty years, accelerated by many Calgarians’ travel to Southeast Asia, Thai food has gone from unknown to almost mainstream.
Meanwhile, in parts of Calgary’s northeast, an Indian-Pakistani enclave has grown over the past few decades, long since the Anand’s restaurant opened.
And with it, we have seen the arrival of restaurants, large and small, spice shops, bakeries, sweet houses and grocery stores associated with India and Pakistan.
As that community grows and matures, entrepreneurs, just like Gene Cioni, will look outside the area to open more outlets.
It’s already happening. Lamb korma and aloo gobi are becoming as commonplace as the once unknown pizza Margherita.
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