L'obsession de onze ans d'un pizzaiolo est le meilleur secret gardé de NDG.

For 220 euros, Giuseppe Sacchetti of G Pizzas could sit in a 400-square-foot apartment near the Vatican with ten strangers. They’d sit around and learn from Gabriele Bonci, a man once dubbed the “Michelangelo of Pizza" by Vogue, who'd spent decades redefining what pizza could be.

It was 2012. At that time, Sacchetti had already spent three years chasing a feeling about food he couldn't quite prove: a specific dough texture, a flavour profile, a way of thinking about Roman food that his circles in Montreal didn’t or wouldn’t understand. He'd been running tests out of the kitchens he was working in back home, once burning through ten kilos of flour in a single weekend, testing over and over. Sacchetti recalls telling anyone who'd listen that Roman food was going to matter soon, that carbonara was going to be everywhere, and that the traditions worth paying attention to were the ones skipped over.

Sacchetti went to Rome to find out if this was all in his head. He ate at the old restaurants tourists walked past, ones that hadn't changed their menus in decades. He ate at Sora Lella on Isola Tiberina three days in a row. He ate at Giggetto in the Jewish quarter. He went to Pizzarium so often that by the end of the trip the staff were giving him discounts.

What he found was confirmation: Meal after meal, the flavours he'd been chasing and logic he'd been working from in his home kitchen were on the right track.

Three days into Bonci's course, Sacchetti mentioned some of the places he'd been eating. Bonci picked up his phone mid-sentence and called one of them. Bonci asked, in Italian, whether a large Canadian-Italian guy had been coming in. The voice on the other end said yes, three times; he’d drank a bottle of wine and eaten seven courses, they didn't know what to do with him, kept sending pasta, and that he wouldn't stop eating. Bonci hung up, looked at Sacchetti, and hugged him.

"You understood everything," the pizzaiolo said.

What Sacchetti understood was that Roman food was, at its core, a set of priorities about ingredients and simplicity and what a meal is actually for. His crutch was that he had spent years trying to live up to it from the other side of the Atlantic. The restaurants he'd chosen, the way he'd eaten, and the questions he was asking all told Bonci that Sacchetti had been paying attention.

So, Sacchetti came home and started from scratch.

A pizza in his mind’s eye

Sacchetti grew up in Montreal the way a lot of Italian-Canadian kids did, with food everywhere, family jokes about opening a restaurant one day, and a palate shaped by Greek-owned pizza joints that then defined the city's pizza culture. He was at CEGEP when reading Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential decided his fate in kitchens. He enrolled at ITHQ, graduated in 2005, and spent the better part of a decade working his way through big rooms: Cavalli, the Queue de Cheval group under Peter Morentzos, and eventually Weinstein & Gavino's, where he was running the kitchen at 27 and doing 300 covers on a slow night.

The pizza obsession started in 2009. A Roman pizzaiolo named Ivan had shown him a traditional Roman dough and something clicked. Experimenting at home, then at whatever restaurant he was working in. "I was chasing a specific texture, flavour, and mouthfeel," he recalls. "Not too acidic, not too flat. I wanted it to be bready but not heavy. I wanted to eat it and not feel stuffed."

He tested wheat flour, spelt, buckwheat, double zero versus no zero versus Canadian bread flour. He had something fixed in his mind and was working toward it. Rome, and Bonci's confirmation, sent him back to the beginning because he then understood exactly what right looked like, and the gap between where he was and where he wanted to be had come into sharp focus.

Things began to crystallize once Sacchetti began spending Sunday mornings at Hof Kelsten over the course of four years. Jeffrey Finkelstein, one of Montreal’s most respected bakers, had tasted Sacchetti's pizza and told him something was there, and offered him the use of his kitchen on days off to keep working on it. They'd mix dough together, test, and feed the staff. Finkelstein started asking questions Sacchetti hadn't thought to ask himself: what temperature are you mixing at, what's your DDT (desired dough temperature), what's in your flour? This opened up another layer of precision not yet accounted for, sending Sacchetti once again to the drawing board.

By 2019, he was close to opening a pizza place, but the pandemic hit: The planned space fell through, the restaurant he was working at closed. He spent part of that summer making ice cream with a pastry chef who needed production help, using the same space he's in now on Saint-Jacques in NDG. He'd already started making frozen pizzas, and figured he'd keep going.

Pizza d’ici

G Pizzas launched September 15, 2020, online only with frozen pizzas sold direct to consumer, deliberately sidestepping the dining room model he'd grown tired of. When the city locked down, every established restaurant moved online overnight, and suddenly he was a brand-new name competing with thousands of other options. People started asking for fresh pizzas, so he started making those too.

These days, everything—from frozen to freshly-baked pizzas as well as Roman taglio, squares, focaccia, and all manner of salads, desserts, and sides that range from hand-rolled manicotti and meatballs to hot dogs on focaccia buns—are sold for takeout, delivery, and pre-ordering for eating in the dining room through the G Pizzas one-stop online shop.

The pizza Sacchetti makes is hard to categorize. Having watched the Montreal restaurant scene fill up with places claiming to do Connecticut-style pizza, Detroit-style pizza, grandma pizza, bar pizza—sometimes it will be sourced from somewhere the owner has either never been or merely taken a short research trip to on a company dime—he knows his pizza is, by his own account, also derivative. Everything is.

What makes it his is the honesty surrounding it: Roman technique in the dough, cold-fermented for a minimum of 36 hours, baked at the temperature the dough can withstand rather than whatever the oven happens to be set at, Canadian flour because that's where he is, and loading on toppings at the centre in a way that reflects the city he grew up in. Heavy but not heavy. Crispy outside, soft inside. A crust people here will recognize, built on a foundation most of them won't.

"You have to step back and look at yourself. You're born in Canada, you grew up in Canada. The pizzas you grew up eating were not Neapolitan pizzas baked at 900 degrees on the streets of Naples. You grew up eating Greek pizza. That's what we all grew up eating," Sacchetti explains. "It has bits of both worlds. I wanted to pay homage to where I live."

When a group of Italian flour reps came in to eat not long ago, they told him his pizza wasn't Italian. He said he hoped not. They pushed back: why wasn't he using Italian flour? He pointed out that most Italian flour isn't actually Italian; the country imports the majority of what it mills from Canada, the US, Ukraine. They didn't have much to say to that.

"We're in Montreal," he told them. "If you want Italian pizza, go back to Italy."

The only show in town

Originally a takeout spot, the 14-seat dining room and another eight on a small concrete terrasse out front would only come later. "It's every Italian grandmother's dining room. There's weird stuff on the walls, weird lamps everywhere, a TV on a counter," Sacchetti says. "We're hiding in plain sight."

A wholesale operation runs in the background for restaurants, boutiques, and fine grocers around the city. The focaccia at a place you like might be his. The pizza base almost certainly could be. He won't confirm or deny specifics, and his rolodex remains a closely guarded secret.

The longer vision involves expanding the wholesale side into its own larger operation, and building out what he calls the Italian bakery experience: cannoli on demand, pandoro at Christmas, zeppole for St. Joseph's Day, using pizza as the anchor for something that gestures back to more traditional neighbourhood Italian bakeries. He's also the only place in the city, he says, where you can order for dine-in online: show up, food is ready, you sit down and eat.

For now though, 14 seats and pizza that took eleven years to get right.

According to Sacchetti, that’s exactly as long as it needed to take.