This recipe, and the man behind it, remains the same from NDG to Saint-Henri

By the time you’re reading this, chances are Mr. Amerigo has already rolled a few hundred meatballs, and he’s probably about to roll a few hundred more. His hands move with the kind of rhythm you only earn through repetition, a quiet muscle memory developed since the age of ten.

“I make them all the same,” he says plainly and he puts them down, one after another, the word reflecting the precise repetition. “I make them all the same.”

The meatballs—served at both Bistro Amerigo in NDG and its younger osteria sibling in Saint-Henri La Spada—are the kind of dish that outlives trends: Classic and consistent, almost stubbornly so.

Depending on the week, Mr. Amerigo and his son Steve Marcone make anywhere from 400 to 1,000 a week. That comes out to about 52,000 a year, but that’s more when accounting for the holidays and catered events, and they’ve been at this for over a decade. If one does the math, these meatballs become less of a dish and more like pure infrastructure.

Over half a million served

But the story here starts decades earlier, in Cassino, Italy, a town nearly levelled during the Second World War. Amerigo was just two when his father died in 1954. By the time he was ten, his mother had broken her right arm, and someone had to step in. “She couldn’t do nothing,” he recalls. “So I started.”

“Put this, put this, do this,” he remembers her saying. It started with the sauce and the mincemeat. The tomatoes came from the garden. The bread, made by his sister and mother, was never store-bought. “She used to make good bread,” he says, a smile audible in his voice.

Amerigo was working long before he got to the stove. “At 11 years old I started to build cages for rabbits. I used to sell them.” Mornings began with collecting eggs. He grew up around chickens, rabbits, tomatoes, and hard work. “I used to be a mechanic,” he says. But an industrial accident in Montreal changed that: “I got burned all here… my legs, my arms… 30% of my body.” He pivoted, built a new life. Thirty-seven years in maintenance. The president of a daycare. Always cooking.

At some point, there was also love. He spotted her on a balcony. Asked around. Found her number in the yellow pages. “We spoke for three months on the phone,” he says. “Then we met in front of her house on Sherbrooke in a park.” Her grandmother insisted on staying outside to supervise the encounter. It didn’t take long. “She gave me a nice glass of lemonade,” he recalls. “She really liked me.”

Same meatballs, same legacy, different rhythm

For Steve Marcone, food and family are indistinguishable. “My strongest memory was when my dad got into an accident at work… he was home for about a year, and so I was with him, a lucky kid next to him just watching TV shows and cooking all day.” The community, he says, would drop off food. The kitchen became a kind of clock. “You’d know what day it was or what time it was just by whatever was coming out of the oven.”

When Steve opened Bistro Amerigo in NDG, the name was a surprise. “My dad didn’t even know it was going to be called Amerigo,” he says. “He found out when we put the sign on the door.” It was more of a continuation than branding.

Before Amerigo became a full-service restaurant, it started as a small boutique run by Steve and his brother. “We’re better brothers than we are business partners,” Steve jokes. His brother eventually stepped back to pursue other ventures, but the family roots remained intact. Now, La Spada carries the torch as Amerigo’s sibling space—same meatballs, same legacy, different rhythm.

Quanto basta

The recipe itself isn’t flashy. Bread soaked in milk. Parmigiano Padano. Parsley—just enough, never too much. “You don’t find that much inside,” Amerigo says. “Just a small piece.” No measuring cups. Just instinct. 

“I know when it’s too much, and I know when it’s not enough.” Quanto basta. As much as is needed.

“Always to put them in the oven because I put it in the oven before,” Amerigo explains. “It’s too many to fry them… when you put them in the sauce, it gives flavour.”

But it’s not just about efficiency. It’s about care. It’s a surprisingly simple recipe, but so it goes for many things. Marcone shrugs: “It’s like coffee. One bean. But if it’s not in the hand that cares, it doesn’t come out well.”

That idea—simplicity executed with obsessive consistency—runs through everything. Steve talks about trying to recreate his father’s chicken soup: “I do everything the same, but it never comes out the same. And it’s just so good.”

What never really leaves

Steve knows the difference between simplicity and laziness. He trained in Italy at 19 after culinary school in Montreal and remembers what North American “Italian” food was like in the late ’90s. “Everything was just being bastardized,” he says. “When I went to Italy, I was struck by how simple it was.” One of the best pasta dishes was also the most basic: “Parsley, chili flakes, garlic, salt, pepper… that’s it.”

Holiday meals weren’t much more complicated—just more abundant. “For Italians around Christmas time… on the 24th it would be all fish,” Steve recalls. “People coming over the house… you’d grab people’s jackets and throw them in the extra room so their clothes wouldn’t smell like fish.” No one called it “the feast of the seven fishes” back then—it was just Christmas Eve.

And that’s the point: Rituals and repetition, passed down through memory and hands.

Back at La Spada, the kitchen moves in quiet synchrony. Meatballs being rolled, oven doors swinging, sauce bubbling. Amerigo watches over the trays, eyes sharp. “That’s what I’m talking about,” he says. “I make them all the same.”

They’ve made hundreds of thousands by now. Maybe more. There’s no official count, just hands that keep working, flavours that stay familiar, and a recipe that refuses to be something replicable by just about anyone—it’s never really left the person who started it.