A (Mostly) Spoken History of Pastificio Etna, Villeray's Iconic Pasta Workshop

Claudia Fancello's father had a retirement plan, and it was to come out of retirement. When he sold his restaurant in Vancouver, he only kept the pasta extruder, when plans to open a little counter in a few years. Then the pandemic arrived and he reconsidered. "He was like, I'm happy where I am in retirement," Claudia says. "Do you want the machine?"

That phone call set off the chain of decisions that led to Etna Pastificio’s address on Jarry East, a corner room in Villeray where Claudia and her partner Sergio Conde make pasta and sauces, sell natural wine, teach classes, serve weekday lunch at four tables, and insist, politely, that they are not a restaurant.

This is the third iteration of Etna, following a wine bar opened three months before COVID which was spun off a tiny pasta counter a few blocks away, then folded (and laminated?) together into one smooth operation. Sergio, who runs the sauces, the books and the Instagram, is camera-shy, so he let Claudia do the talking.

"For me, Etna encapsulates this idea of fertility and bounty and taste, and also the darkness. It conjures so much emotion."

By boat, for Expo

Claudia's father left Dorgali, a village in Sardinia's Nuoro region, at 15 to work in restaurants. He landed in a front-of-house gig in Brussels for French fine dining, back when the cooking often happened tableside.

"There was a call for Expo 67 in Montreal, for people who worked in hospitality who spoke more than one language," she says. "He found out about that, and came by boat with his cousin from Belgium to Montreal for the World’s Fair."

He stayed long enough to run a French fine dining counter inside a residence on Peel before heading west, working at the Bayshore in Vancouver and opening his own place in 1975, the year Claudia was born.

"It started off as French and Italian fine dining," she says, “but he realized fresh pasta was way more family-oriented and convivial."

Growing up in the industry had a to-be-expected effect: "As most kids who grew up in the restaurant, my first instinct was to get as far away from it as possible."

But Claudia at the time didn’t lacke for teachers. While the family had no blood relatives in Vancouver, there was a tight network of Sardinian families, and her godparents were both formidable cooks. "They spent a lot of time teaching me the traditional recipes," she says. "My godfather was a real crazy foodie. He wasn't a traditionalist. He mostly cooked Italian, but being from Vancouver, he'd try to incorporate a lot of Japanese culture."

Claudia's earliest pasta memory is a fork. "I remember specifically pushing my thumb on the fork for gnocchi. I was probably five or six years old."

The shape she's proudest of took much longer. Culurgiones, the Sardinian dumplings pinched shut with a braided seam, refused to cooperate for years. "It's a rhythm thing," she says. "If you stop, you're going to screw it up. You have to find the rhythm of the braiding, and then it's there. You can't second-guess yourself. You just have to do it."

She collected techniques wherever she found them. Her best friend in her twenties was from Istria, the Croatian peninsula that was once part of Italy, and Claudia would spend months at a time in the family's house learning shapes like fuži. "Pasta making has always been something I've sought out from elders," she says. "The traditional stuff."

Years later, at a mattarello course at La Vecchia Scuola Bolognese, an instructor put it in terms she understood: "She was like, pasta making is a dance. And I totally agree. You're always in movement. When you're making your dough, you're always rocking."

"Spending time with friends and family in the kitchen brought me so much joy growing up," she says. "It's not a lonely thing. It can be super convivial and fun, making things with people you love."

Dance and stagecraft in the kitchen

Claudia studied dance at Concordia and spent the better part of two decades as a performer, waiting tables between gigs because hospitality was "always something that was very second nature to me." Her longest run was with PME-ART, the experimental company co-led by novelist Jacob Wren. For about ten years, she performed The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information, a piece she co-created with Wren and Caroline Dubois.

"It was a durational performance, so we could do it for an hour or for three hours," she says. "We would travel with a stack of records, and for each record we had a story. In between each story, we'd play a bit of the record. It was a way of weaving music and storytelling together."

"We called it the hospitality series," she says. "It was about how to make people feel really comfortable in performance settings. Throughout my life, I've honed a lot of skills in terms of making people feel like they're at home in our space."

"I spent, I don't know, five years where I didn't even have an apartment in Montreal," she says. "I'd be on the road, come back for a few months, then be on the road again. I realized at a certain point that I just wanted to find a home, and Montreal was always pulling me back."

Some of this stagecraft survived the career change: Etna's pasta station sits in the front window, in full view of Jarry Street. "Seeing people make things is always a draw," she says. "But being at ease being watched is particular. Not everybody is up for it."

Málaga, by way of Milan

As for Sergio, he grew up in Málaga, where his family ran a chicken rotisserie that also turned out the region's home-cooking staples: tortilla, paella, stews, seafood. Before Montreal, he lived in Milan photographing high-end interiors, working the Salone del Mobile circuit and travelling all over Italy. ("His Italian is spectacular," Claudia says.)

He arrived in Montreal in 2014, and he met Claudia online. "I think it was OkCupid," she says.

Around 2017, Claudia was trying to open a small aperitivo bar with friends. The search for a space dragged on, and the group drifted. "Life happens, and people are making other choices," she says. "In my head, I still really wanted to do this project. And Sergio was like, okay, let's do it together."

She admits to some hesitation. "You're always a little wary of jumping into something with your life partner. But we work very well together because we're very different. We really complement each other. And running anything in the restaurant realm, it's never over. So it's great to know that whatever happens, it's not going to be a problem."

Etna’s first iteration as a wine bar opened on Jarry in December 2019, with Italian and Spanish small plates drawn from both families and a natural wine list Claudia was adamant about at a time when much of the city wasn't. ("Now it's everywhere," she says.)

The name can confuse people, especially Sicilians who recognize the evocation of the volcano. "We had our son just before the restaurant opened," Claudia explains. "We always thought if we were going to have a girl, we were going to call her Etna. So the restaurant is very much our second child."

"Sicilians are always like, 'But you're Sardinian,'" she says. "For me, Etna encapsulates this idea of fertility and bounty and taste, and also the darkness. It conjures so much emotion."

Three months later, the city shut down. "We didn't even really establish who we were or what our clientele was," she says. A handful of neighbours had already become regulars, and they pushed the couple to sell something, anything. Etna started packing apéro boxes, wine and snacks meant to be carried to the park.