The 15-year history behind one of the best pasta shops in Toronto

What began as a pasta shop in a Little Italy basement has blossomed into a certified Toronto favourite, and 15 years later, they’re still doing what they do best.

Ask any self-respecting pasta afficionado in Toronto where to find the best in the city, and there’s a likely chance they’ll respond, emphatically, Famiglia Baldassarre.

A far cry from fellow high-falutin front runners like Cafe Renee or Ascari Enoteca, Famiglia Baldassarre, so-named after founder Leandro Baldassarre, occupies a humble 10-seat space on Geary Avenue, only offering a no-reservation lunch service from noon to 2 p.m. Wednesday to Friday.

It seems as though the humility aspect has always been baked into the concept, though, considering the business was born out of a basement unit in a building owned by Leandro’s former boss, David Lee (Nota Bene, Planta).

Upon returning to Toronto from a three-year stint living and working in Italy back in 2010, Leandro told us, Lee, under whom Leandro had worked at Nota Bene, offered up the unit as a space for Leandro to make pasta.

“[David Lee is] like, ‘You want to make me some pasta? You could use this space?’ I said, ‘Sure,'” Leandro told us. “So I bought a little table and a little wooden board and whatnot. I got a fridge, and I just tried out making pasta for it, and Nota Bene.”

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He continued to make pasta for Lee’s restaurant a couple days a week, and, in what Leandro describes as a “slow snowball effect,” weeks turned into months, and months into years, and, slowly but surely, word started getting out about Famiglia Baldassarre.

As former Nota Bene chefs and staff moved on to other restaurants, they began to call Leandro up to supply their pasta, too.

“And then eventually it turned into, you know, a pretty decent little business,” Leandro told us. “I could, at least, barely support myself. It was good enough. And that’s how it really started.”

About five years in, Leandro renovated the basement unit, branded his business and started his Instagram account. Six years in, he rented out the unit Famiglia Baldassarre currently calls home on Geary Avenue. Thus began the metamorphosis into the Baldassarre we know today.

Upon opening its doors, the business was still operating exclusively in a wholesale capacity, but the new location, positioned, for the first time, on street level, poised an entirely new direction for Famiglia Baldassarre.

“There was an opportunity to open the doors to the public,” Leandro says. “Before, when I was in a basement, there was no choice. But since I was I had a front door I was like, ‘wow, what if we open the front door here and open the store up, or turn it into a little store where you just go buy pasta too?'”

That’s exactly what he did, launching a sort of members-only club for their lunch service, geared towards the other people who worked in the building.

Pretty quickly, though, this exclusive, members-only club ballooned to around 200 members, and it was time to, as Leandro says, “go legitimate,” obtaining their restaurant licence and opening, in a limited capacity, to the general public.

Suffice it to say, as members of the aforementioned general public, we’re certainly glad he did. The critical masses agree, too, as Famiglia Baldassarre earned a highly coveted Michelin recommendation in 2024, after years of the pasta shop’s devoted fans bemoaning the organization for overlooking Baldassarre.

Reflecting back on the past 15 years, not to mention the dazzling degree of respect and adoration he’s earned during that time, Leandro told us that it can be hard to sit back and smell the roses, as it were.

“It definitely takes a lot of stepping back to kind of feel anything because, being a small business, I’m often really buried in it,” Leandro says.

“You’re really kind of, you’re up to your eyeballs in work, in daily stress, and just running a business,” he adds, “but when there are moments you can step back… there are little moments of recognition that make you actually realize you and your team kind of are doing something great and special. I mean, that was always the intention.”

Baldassarre, and Leandro’s kitchen career at large, has never been a casual thing for him, he told us.

Working in fine dining for his whole career, he’s always been motivated by creating the best possible product, experience, and team, ensuring that every last detail is perfect, so it’s really no wonder why Famiglia Baldassarre has always gained the fanfare that it has, but, Leandro told us, it’s still nice to have it recognized.

“It’s nice to see that recognized in little ways, but honestly, it’s the public support that has been the best,” he says. “It’s been so good.”

“There’s people that, when you get popular, just want to get in the line and want to go once and take a couple pictures, but there is some people that really, really appreciate it as much as we do, the people that are making it, and that that’s that’s the growth that really matters,” he adds.

While running the business is, admittedly, “hard work all the time,” the appreciation he sees from the community — from folks lining up at pop-ups to an old Italian man saying that Leandro’s pasta reminds him of how his wife used to make it — makes it beyond worth it.

“Those are the moments where you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m never quitting forever, you know?'”

Fifteen years in, and Leandro told us that the hopes he has for the future, both of Famiglia Baldassarre and his own career independent of it, are limitless.

“It’s impossible to say that Baldassarre will exist in that location forever, because it is Toronto,” he told us, but, “I think it’s going to be a forever thing in one way, shape or form, but in probably something a little more concrete that people can sink their teeth into.”

He also plans to get Famiglia Baldassarre pasta in more stores so that people can eat it at home, but, he assures, it’ll never be a mass-production type of operation.

“It’ll never be a large scale. It’s always handmade,” Leandro says. “It’s always a lot of work behind it, so it’ll always be a small scale.”

Famiglia Baldassarre is located at 122 Geary Ave.