Café Gentile opens in West Island's Dollard-des-Ormeaux

Anthony Gentile has a story about growing up Italian in Beaconsfield. His mother would pack his school lunches—meatballs, chicken cutlets—and the bags would get greasy. The smell embarrassed him enough that he'd swap his food with other kids.

Now he runs restaurants built around those same sandwiches, and his fourth location just opened in Dollard-des-Ormeaux, minutes from where he grew up.

Café Gentile's West Island location on Sources Boulevard has been packed since opening a few weeks back. It's the biggest operation Anthony's launched, but it's also the one he's wanted to open since entering the restaurant business. The other three locations—the original on Chabanel, then Westmount, then the Pizza Parlour—were steps toward this.

His grandfather Ignazio started the first Gentile café 66 years ago. It was straightforward: habit-forming good coffee and solid sandwiches. The chicken cutlet sandwich turned into their calling card. Anthony's father Tony worked alongside Ignazio and later taught Anthony the fundamentals, including an early lesson in branding: give customers keychains stamped with the Gentile name. "Once the keys were on, they were hard to take off," Anthony says. "So customers would always remember Café Gentile." He's brought the keychains back since.

Westmount opened nine years ago, Pizza Parlour four years after that. Both pulled steady neighbourhood traffic, and Westmount drew people from across the city on weekends. But Anthony's watched that pattern shift. "Going downtown has become hard," he says. "Traffic, parking, construction—people are staying closer to home. If you live in Laval, you stay in Laval. Same applies here."

The West Island space seats close to 100, with room for another 46 on the terrasse come spring. He's installing a pergola with motorized louvers—if it rains during service, he can close them rather than scramble to relocate reservations. The buildout pulls from everything he's learned: Chabanel's quick-service coffee counter, Westmount's dinner program, the Pizza Parlour's technique. "This is a culmination of a lot of different things," he says. "Everything I had left in my brain with ideas for the other places, I put in here."

Lunch runs the standards—chicken cutlet, meatballs, eggplant parm, salads. Dinner merges both restaurants with pizza folded in. "You want pizza and a beer, you're having pizza and a beer," Anthony says. "You want homemade gnocchi and a meatball, you're having that. You want a 12-ounce New York strip, branzino—you touch all avenues. For the masses, you need a little bit for everybody."

His approach to Italian cooking boils down to consistency over complexity. "Less is more," he says. "I'm not here to recreate. Keep it simple, execute it every time. People will appreciate that." Pizza dough gets three to four days of fermentation. Sauce gets made fresh daily. Cheese quality matters. "All these things, they come a long way."

Operating at this scale means staffing around 50 people. He's moved trusted staff from the other locations to help launch, putting Westmount on what he calls autopilot with his existing crew there. The challenge is getting everyone aligned from day one, but he's confident in the team.

The timing makes sense: The West Island's pulling serious restaurants now, not just chains, as part of a broader shift where city restaurateurs go where parking is easy and crowds are hungry for quality.

For Anthony, that's a plus, but it's really about returning to where he started. Those lunch bag trades? Looking back, he wishes he'd kept the food.