A (mostly) spoken history of Mano Cornuto, Griffintown's unexpected Italian institution

Tyler Maher isn't so sure when I posit that Mano Cornuto, in its own way, changed the game in Montreal's dining scene.

"I don't know who you're talking to, bro," he laughs, "but I'll take the smoke."

Fair enough. But it's hard to argue with: In August 2019, four guys who'd barely worked together—Tyler from Foxy, Vito Ciocca and James Baran from the Garde Manger crew, and Alex Ragoussis from Crew Collective & Cafe—opened an Italian café on a then-dead corner in Griffintown. The budget was tight enough that they were doing their own buildout, counting foot traffic at 6 a.m. like amateur anthropologists, trying to convince themselves this weird little space could work. They had maybe eight staff total when they embarked.

The partnership itself was borderline reckless in some ways. Alex came in for dinner at Foxy one night while Tyler was working. Told Vito about the service. Next thing, Vito and Alex showed up together, and Tyler and Vito started talking.

"We just sort of launched into it," Tyler says. "This thing really did kind of go from zero to full drop-in within, like, a two-week period. Before you could make a change, you were already two feet in, and we were like, all right, we're seeing this through."

Four people. Different backgrounds. No shared work history to speak of. "There was definitely some head-bumping at the beginning," Tyler admits, "in terms of getting into a partnership with four different people who haven't worked together before." They had to learn how to communicate, how to carve out roles, how to navigate Vito's nostalgia for his father's classic Italian cafés, James's cooking instincts, Alex's operations mindset, Tyler's service philosophy. "It was either shoot your shot with what you had learned over the years, or just keep doing the same old thing. We were all ready to take a change in our lives."

Six weeks later, the world shut down.

Most restaurants would've folded. Mano never even closed. They started making pizza. They did meal kits. They tried everything, stayed open in some fashion, kept the lights on through sheer refusal to quit. "We were just so fresh and new at it that there was no option to not keep trying," Tyler says. "We just kept reinventing."

The pandemic, weirdly, became a teacher. It forced them to figure out systems at a pace they could actually handle—and it stress-tested a partnership that had zero track record. At one point they laid everyone off, and it was just Vito, James, and Tyler together (Alex had moved to BC). "Getting through those grindy times definitely allowed us to realize what each other are capable of and that we're down to get through some shit together," Tyler says. They learned how to integrate management roles, how to delegate, how to run a proper operation—all while the stakes were lower, the room more manageable.

"That's a bit of a silver lining," Tyler reflects. "COVID slowed things down enough that we were learning as young operators how to integrate other people into management roles in a gentle way. It allowed us to slowly figure them out." By the time things opened back up, they had the infrastructure to go seven days a week. "And I think that was a big game-changer. You kind of can't ever go back."

Today, Mano runs from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., every single day.

The door literally never locks: There are mornings when the overnight cleaning crew high-fives the bakers arriving at 5 a.m. to start the focaccia and pastries. What started with a handful is now a staff that's 65 strong, if you count the Mano Figa café next door. That narrow room on Ottawa Street, the one they took a wild bet on, is consistently full by my count (try getting a reservation on short notice except after the holidays). Lunch, dinner, Tuesday, Saturday—doesn't matter. The terrasse in summer just amplifies what's already there.

The economics of it shouldn't work, but somehow do. "There's this sweet spot with pricing," Tyler notes. Quality Italian food that's accessible enough to roll through for more than once a week, elevated enough that it feels special. It's the kind of calculation that defines Montreal dining in 2025—how to make something excellent without gatekeeping, how to be a neighbourhood spot that also draws people from across the city. The fact that they're open all day, every day, helps of course but so does the fact that different crowds show up at different times: business lunches, quick takeout runs, lingering dinners, industry folks unwinding on their Monday-Tuesday weekends.

"I think there's a lot of people that have different needs," Tyler explains. "And to be able to touch on all those points makes it a really fun, happening, busy corner." It's less destination restaurant than 'restaurant as social club'—the kind of place where you might run into chefs from other spots, where the energy feels lived-in rather than performed, where you're not sure if you're dining out or just hanging with people who happen to be really good at hospitality.

There's this vibe Tyler calls "structured looseness" that runs through everything.

"We all have a lot of experience in our fields, and there's a way that we think would be a cool version of doing it," he explains. "We're not worried about giving that its fair shot and putting it out there."

It's not chaos, exactly. It's more like watching people who know the rules well enough to break them thoughtfully. James keeps the cooking simple but with family tricks and regional influences. Vito brings the warmth, the nostalgia, the conviction that a café should feel like something his father would recognize. Alex built the backend systems that let them scale without losing the plot. Tyler ties it together front-of-house, making sure the experience feels authentic rather than studied.

"We like to go out and eat the way we would like to," Tyler says. "We want the quality of the food to be good. We want your experience to be felt—you feel seen—but it's not like we're trying to create this fantastical fake experience. It needs to be authentic."

That authenticity shows up in weird ways. The menu changes with the seasons, but the Caesar salad stays. Pasta is fresh. The focaccia gets made every morning. The wine list leans natural and changes constantly. Vito's cocktails pull from Italian amaros and bitters. You can grab an espresso at noon without anyone judging you for breaking Italy's "no cappuccino after 11 a.m." rule.

The whole point is comfort, not cosplay.

There's something particularly Montreal about that balance—honouring Italian tradition without being precious about it. Montreal Italian culture is its own thing, shaped by generations of families who brought their regional recipes and then watched them evolve in a new context. "Everybody's version of X, Y, or Z is the best version because it's from their region of Italy," Tyler notes. "There's definitely a strong influence of James having Campobasso background, Vito with Sicilian roots." But it's filtered through decades of Montreal's restaurant scene, through the way this city eats and drinks and gathers. It's not a trattoria in Palermo because, quite simply, it's not a trattoria in Palermo.

It's a spot where second and third-generation Italian-Canadians can taste something familiar, and everyone else can feel like they're in on it.

Griffintown in 2019 wasn't exactly a dining destination. The neighbourhood was all cranes and condos, infrastructure barely keeping pace with development, a weird in-between zone that hadn't figured out its identity yet. But Tyler and Vito saw something, or maybe they just convinced themselves to see it. They sat on that corner between 6 and 9 a.m., literally counting people walking by, trying to gauge whether the foot traffic could sustain them. "We did all kinds of weird shit like that," Tyler laughs. "But we believed it was a wild enough little corner that was just coming up."

There was naivety in it, sure. "Sometimes that ignorance is great," Tyler admits. "You're just like, yo, here's the spot that sort of suits some of the needs that we think we have. You're diving into a world where you have your experiences, but in working in them, not creating them." They picked a space with the right guts, which kept initial costs down. They didn't worry about all the variables they couldn't control. They just kept their heads down and made it work.

Now, years later, people tell them they're lucky to have that location. "I remember people being like, man, how did you get this location, you're so lucky," Tyler says. "I always thought that was kind of interesting in how people used to see the space and area." The neighbourhood's exploded around them—more housing, more foot traffic, and density that makes the operation sustainable.

They carved the room into reservations and walk-ins to manage the chaos. They kept refining, kept tweaking, kept trying to make certain systems more streamlined. The leads they've brought up over the last three years—management roles in kitchen and front-of-house—have been crucial to raising the bar on service and food. It's the professionalization of what started as four guys winging it, learning how to actually run a business while also running a business.

"There's a feeling when you walk in there that I get personally," Tyler says, "of the tale of what made it to be where it is today."

What's next? They're in a "growth headspace," as Tyler puts it. They've looked at spaces, explored ideas for how the brands—all under the Grupo Amuleto umbrella—could evolve. The idea is to empower some of those management leads, give them pieces of the pie. Centralize production so they can scale properly without losing the soul of it. But nothing's set. "It's not a rigid way of seeing ourselves," he says. "It's sort of like... the ways in which we could see the growth happening."

The whole Grupo Amuleto thing—that umbrella name tying together the amulets, the good luck charms—came after Mano Figa opened, a way to acknowledge that these projects share DNA. But the flagship, the original bet, that narrow room on Ottawa Street, remains the heart of it all.

Ask Tyler what he'd miss most if it all disappeared tomorrow and he doesn't hesitate: "The little story that we've built. Walking into that room and just the morning routine or whatever."

Four strangers, a once-weird corner, a pandemic, and sheer stubbornness. That's the story. The rest is just showing up, every day, 11 to 11, door unlocked, focaccia in the oven, and trusting that people can feel the difference when someone actually gives a shit.