Passionate about Pizza
Piatto is a verified authentic Neapolitan wood-fired pizzeria that serves customers in 8 locations across Eastern Canada, and like so many great stories, it almost never happened. For our founder, Brian Vallis, it was never in the plan to start a chain of family run pizzerias. It wasn’t some great business opportunity that just needed to be seized. It was the result of the winding path of life putting you, often abruptly, at an unavoidable crossroads. And this was the case for us almost exactly 10 years ago. It’s at these moments that you are confronted with a decision. Play it safe, stay in your comfort zone, and try to get things back on the road they were on? Or use this crossroads, this disruption in the normal course of your life's events, to allow yourself to pursue that crazy idea that’s been eating away at you for so long?
Where does that idea come from, you might ask? It’s passion. It’s the daydream you’ve lived athousand times. It’s the nagging intuition, formed through all of your life’s experiences, that says, 'I’m supposed to be doing something else, and perhaps, something more'. And what were those formative life experiences for our founding father? Where did the passion come from, and what was it for? You guessed it. Pizza! Well, a certain pizza experience, to be more precise. You see, in a previous life, Brian’s work provided him with the opportunity to travel. In those travels, and in between triathlons, marathons, and hard sessions at the gym, he’d always gravitate towards his favourite things, namely pizza, wine, and coffee. You do this for long enough, and you begin to develop your own preferences for what it takes to have an awesome pizza experience. For the food, you just can’t beat authentic Neapolitan pizza, cooked in a wood-fired, hand-made Stefano Ferrara oven, using only the highest quality, freshest ingredients, many of which come direct from Naples. For the drink, a classic cold Peroni beer, a hand-pulled Illy coffee, or one of many great Italian wines. And what of the other elements of the dining experience? These too were formed by Brian’s travels. He thought this simple yet delicious food should be consumed in a warm, friendly, relaxed yet cultured atmosphere - a mix between an english pub, a french cafe, and a lively pizzeria in Naples. A place where family and friends can meet and catch-up over good food and drink.
But these were just observations, and ‘what if’s’. There was no plan to actually DO any of this. Who starts a new business at 57 years of age, and a restaurant no less!? What’s my point here? The point is that as we go through life, we gravitate towards certain things, and they become the things that we look forward to doing, or look forward to learn more and talk about. In a way, they become the things that, at least in part, we come to ‘live for’. We do all the other things we need to do, so we can do THOSE things that we really enjoy, whatever they may be. For some, we don’t merely want to enjoy those things, we want to expand on them and share them with others! We want to let our passion for them fill our imagination with the ways they could be EVEN BETTER. And so, when life delivers us to those fateful crossroads, it asks, 'which voice will you listen to this time?' The voice we know deep down is right, or the one that tells us to try and just ‘get back to normal’. For the record, this may have nothing to do with business, and if your ’normal’ is exactly what you want, great! But for many, life’s momentum can carry us down certain roads, and sometimes, we end up way further down a road that we never intended to be on in the first place. Crossroads, challenges and crises of any kind are, albeit inconvenient, opportunities to remember, or perhaps even discover for the first time, why you’re doing what you’re doing, and how you want to go about doing it from here.
Nearly everyone’s life and business has been disrupted this year, and the challenges have been immense. For us and many other businesses it’s another crossroad, its decision time again, do we pack up our tent and go home or do we find a way through this challenge. It’s a time to reflect on what your purpose is, why you are doing it, who you are doing it for and what you are doing to express it.
What does that mean for us? It means that we recognize how much we value our time together around our tables with family and friends eating, chatting and enjoying each other’s company. It's a huge part of our social interactions which we miss. For us it means making sure we keep delivering value to our customers based upon their needs and recognizing their new restrictions, new offerings that they can make and enjoy at home. Food that is more than the evening meal, but also entertainment for the family as they make pizzas together, like Brian did with his kids every Friday night for years. Grab and go meals for those that are too busy or simply not in the mood to cook. We continue our commitment to delivering the best value we can as these times have put financial strain on us all. We try to craft an experience that merges aspects of many different cultures, so that even if you can’t hop on a plane, we can temporarily “transport“ you to the streets of Naples. And it means employing all the best-practice sanitation and safety methods available, to make sure that our guests can enjoy themselves with the utmost peace of mind.
Times like these can force you out of comfort and complacency, and though challenging, can end up being the impetus for refining and understanding even better the ‘why’ of whatever it is you are doing, or wish to do. As Connor McGregor has said, ‘you must improvise, adapt, and overcome’. That’s exactly what we are trying to do as a business, and only time will tell if we succeed, but we will continue to do our best. We encourage you, whether as a business or individual, to confront these times with the same attitude. You never know, you may look back on this period as the pivotal moment that caused you to do, be or create something amazing.
Salud!