Sicilian-born chef Roberto Marotta brings flavours of his homeland to Toronto

Credit to Author: Lisa Evans| Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2023 15:19:45 +0000

For Chef Roberto Marotta, it was love at first sight. His now wife and business partner Jacqueline Nicosia was visiting family in Sicily when she met Marotta. “She was supposed to be there two weeks and she stayed over a year,” he says.

For Chef Roberto Marotta, it was love at first sight. His now wife and business partner Jacqueline Nicosia was visiting family in Sicily when they met, and he decided to follow his heart, and dive into a new culture.

But Nicosia was from Toronto and decided she wanted to move back to where she grew up and invited her Sicilian fiancé to return home with her. Marotta had never thought of immigrating to Canada, but was willing to dive into a new culture and a new life.

“I’ve always been very adventurous in my career. You never know in life until you try and I was in love, so it made it easy,” he says.

He was met with 9 cm of snow on the ground and -10 C weather. “It was interesting,” says Marotta. “I got the feeling it would be a challenge to adjust.”

Back home in Italy, Marotta ran a successful restaurant on the water in Milazzo in Sicily called ‘Mood’ that specialized in the region’s cuisine. He wanted to continue to share his love for his country’s food and culture in his new home, Toronto. But he was now starting from scratch, and was going to have to learn everything about the produce, meats and seafood available here. Knowing he had to get some boots on the ground to figure out how the restaurant scene worked, Marotta began working for a few restaurants.

The most interesting to Marotta was the very different and very short seasons in Toronto. For fresh fruits and vegetables, the season goes from beginning of June to the end of September, a much more concentrated growing season than what Marotta was used to in Italy.

Aside from the seasonality of fresh foods here, Marotta was struck by how different the restaurant supply chain is from what he was used to in Italy. While running his restaurant in Sicily, Marotta knew local fisherman personally and would meet them at the boat daily. “The fisherman, the farmer, they became your friend.” In Toronto, the supply chain requires a lot more logistics management to ensure high quality ingredients. You cannot simply walk down to the dock to get fresh fish. Instead, seafood is flown overnight from all over the world. This global way of supplying the restaurant was new to Marotta, who was used to having direct personal contact with product suppliers.

Marotta took on a few partnership ventures that ultimately failed. “Some people promised me a partnership, developing the concept, designing the menu. Three times it (failed) before I finally decided I can’t do this for other people,” says Marotta. His wife quit her job and the two decided to open their own restaurant, one that would allow Marotta to showcase the flavours of his homeland, Sicily.

“My son was three years old. We’d just bought a house. It was a risky time but I think it was the right thing to do,” he says.

Ardo, named after Marotta’s son, Leonardo, who couldn’t quite pronounce his full name as a toddler and called himself “Ardo”, opened in 2016. The restaurant is located in the King Street area of Toronto, close to the St. Lawrence Market.

When Marotta struggled to find some of the quality ingredients he was used to using back home, he and his wife launched Vivi Imports, named after their daughter Vivienne, to bring fine ingredients from Sicily to Canada. These authentic Sicilian products, such as olive oils, sauces and chocolates, are not only used in their restaurants, but are sold in fine foods stores across the GTA.

Marotta has even found a way to recreate the structure of relationships he had with suppliers back home. “I now have direct contact with a fisherman in Newfoundland. He has three or four boats. He’ll call me and say this is what we caught. It will be in Toronto in the next 48 hours.” Marotta also has a Portuguese supplier who he sources seafood from. “It flies overnight,” he says.

The public response to Ardo’s opening has been positive since day one. “A lot of my customers have travelled a couple of times a year to Italy. They have a sense of what elevated Italian cuisine can be.”

Marotta says he is often greeted by customers who are delighted to return to Toronto and seeing something that has the level of quality of what they had in Italy. Ardo was even named one of Toronto Life’s favourite Italian restaurants.

After the success of Ardo, Marotta decided to open a second restaurant, called Dova. Located in Cabbagetown, Toronto, the restaurant opened in August 2020.

Although Marotta has been no stranger to road blocks including COVID delaying his second restaurant’s opening, failed partnership ventures and navigating a new work culture, he attributes his success to his perseverance.

“When you immigrate, when you move from another place, it’s going to be a challenge. Everything is going to be new and different. You have to have an open mind,” he says.

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