There’s something refreshing about a place that never seems to change. And you could be forgiven for thinking Caffè Italia is one of them. For 70 years, it has stood at the heart of Little Italy, welcoming anyone in need of a coffee, a snack, a chat, or simply a little time being alone in a crowd.
But it has a secret: In 2012, the café was entirely gutted and renovated. And yet, most people don’t even know.
“We spent a lot of money to make it look exactly the same,” says Nadia Serri, who runs Caffè Italia with her sister Laura. “The nicest compliment was when a lady came in and she said, ‘I heard that you guys are planning a renovation.’ And I said, ‘Thank you. The renovation has been done.’
“We kept the place ugly. Just a prettier shade of ugly.”
Nadia and Laura are unsentimental when they talk about the modest business their family has run since 1956, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t attached. Quite the opposite: they grew up here, as did their children–Giordano and Gianluca on Nadia’s side, and Max and Alyssa on Laura’s. Nadia started working there when she was 12 or 13—“As soon as I was tall enough to reach the coffee machine,” she says—and as an adult, she spent weekends at the café, after spending weekdays at her husband’s import company. When Laura retired from her teaching career, she plunged into work at the café.
“She’s never been so busy since she retired,” quips Nadia.
“Yeah,” replies Laura. “I’m going to retire. Again.”
Il ritrovo dei cuori solitari
The dedication is understandable when you understand how much Caffè Italia has anchored both Nadia and Laura’s family, and the neighbourhood around it. Regular customers who started coming when the café first opened in 1956 are still around. “They’re in their 90s now, these old, old-time customers,” says Laura. “Like Mom.”
Mom is Luciana Barsetti-Serri, the face of Caffè Italia for decades. She started working there when she was 18. Her parents, Bruno Barsetti and Lea Fabbri-Barsetti, had immigrated from Tuscany and took the café over from Lea’s brother-in-law, who first opened it.
“[My great-uncle] was only running it for a few months,” explains Laura. “One story I remember is that it was Nonna who gave it the name.”
“They were debating what to call it,” explains Nadia. “They were thinking of calling it after different regions or different cities in Italy, and my grandmother just came up with ‘Italia.’ You don’t want to offend one group or privilege another, so just be general. It’s more inclusive.”
Back then, the clientele was almost entirely male Italian immigrants working jobs in construction and other sectors.
“The men would come alone,” says Laura. “They would work to make enough money to then bring in the families—the brothers, the mothers, the wives that they had. So this place, because it was Italian-ish, and we had the products, and we had the coffee, and we had a bit of food, it was…”
“A meeting place,” Nadia chimes in.
“A meeting place for the lonely Italian men who were here without families,” continues Laura. “So they would come here and hang.”
“And this was their living room,” says Nadia. “One hundred percent. And in the morning they would actually come because some of them were unemployed, but they would be called on. So the companies would come by with their truck and say, ‘You, you, you, you, you—today you’re working.’ That’s why we opened so early.”
“My heart was here.”
From the beginning, Nadia and Laura’s grandparents made a point of taking care of anyone who needed help. “People came here with not much means,” says Nadia. “And I remember my grandfather offering breakfast to people. Even if it was just toast. It was very simple. But I have to say that we’ve kept that up.”
“We’ve kept that up in the sense that, obviously, if someone comes in need, we’ll oblige,” says Laura. “We’re very welcoming to a lot of people who are maybe not welcome anywhere else. There are a few characters that we embrace.”
The line between customer and family has always been fluid: Nadia and Laura’s parents met when their father was a customer and their mom worked there. “Within a few months, they were married,” says Nadia.
Laura takes out her phone and opens a photo of a crowded 1950s scene of men standing around the bar. “My mom was behind the counter,” she says, pointing at Luciana, her youthfulness belied by the command she has over the room. “Over there, that’s my great-uncle. And my dad is the guy over there, in the background.”
He is standing at the very back of the room, hard to see past the other men, but notable for the fact that he is beaming—and apparently looking straight at Luciana.
Laura came into the picture soon after; Nadia followed 11 years later. As a child, Laura and her family lived in Villeray, but her parents enrolled her in École Notre-Dame-de-la-Défense in Little Italy so she could walk to Caffè Italia for lunch. Saint-Laurent Boulevard was still a two-way street at the time and her parents forbade her from crossing it alone. So, she would wait across the street from the café until one of the regular customers came to walk her through traffic.
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