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Our mission at Gruppo Terroni has always been to bring authenticity and tradition to all the dishes on our menu. To do this, we emphasize the simplicity and quality of the ingredients we import from Italy. Materia prima, or the raw material, is the soul of our kitchen. We don’t cut any corners when it comes to materia prima and we never will. When it comes to tradition, we want to keep it going. While we stay true to time honored recipes and methods, we continue to evolve and innovate with time.
Terroni first opened in 1992 as a humble storefront selling a few specialty items from Italy, with four barstools, a Gaggia coffee machine and some panini made to order. Cosimo and Paolo, two Italian-Canadians with a southern Italian background, opened this business because they wanted to share a slice of the real Italy with their hometown. After a rocky first year, surviving also thanks to a popular foosball table, they invested in a second-hand pizza oven. The rest is history.
At the mark of our 30th anniversary, we look back at those first days and we take in the incredible growth we have experienced with immense gratitude. A lot has evolved since then, but after 30 years, the objective remains the same: to deliver a food experience worthy of the generations that came before us. As much an ideology as a restaurant, our core values of staying true to tradition are a testament to our longevity. In a world of constant change, this will continue to guide us through the next 30 years of Terroni.
30 years of Terroni and the truth is, we couldn’t have built this business over the past three decades without the strong foundation of family. Meet some of the people who work hard to deliver an authentic Italian food experience, every time.
Born and raised in Toronto by parents who immigrated from Calabria, Cosimo has always felt deeply connected to Italy. After leaving high school at 17, Cosimo started to work in restaurants to make enough money to visit Italy with his friends over the summer. He loved Italy and Italian food so much that his dream was to open his own place as soon as possible to share a real Italian experience with his Canadian people. In 1992, at the age of 25, Cosimo opened the first Terroni restaurant on Queen Street West with his good friend Paolo Scoppio. 30 years later Cosimo has nine unique Terroni, Sud Forno and Spaccio locations in Toronto and Los Angeles along with Stock T.C in collaboration with Cumbrae’s and Porta, Toronto’s first Italian meal delivery service. Cosimo spends every Friday he can at Spaccio East hand-making panzerotti with Chef Gio Alonzi. Their corner of the kitchen is a hive of activity where raucous laughter radiates warmth and a place where everyone is welcome to stop by and join in. There are no airs and graces with Cosimo, he is a genuinely caring person with time for everyone. His passion for food is infectious and it is clear to everyone around him that his convictions drive all that he does. The infamous ‘no modification, no substitution’ policy stems from these convictions, from his unerring respect for everyone who has come before and has worked to keep Italian traditions alive. Cosimo is no campaigner; he’s not interested in converting people to his way of thinking. He simply wants the food to be how it has been for generations. Part of this also means giving his customers the best, even if that means making less. Italian cooking is all about simplicity and high-quality, fresh ingredients and Cosimo takes great pride in sourcing the very best for all his guests from wine to olive oil to organic San Marzano tomatoes that cost twice as much, but taste so much better. When you enter any of Cosimo’s locations you are no longer an employee or a customer, you are family. This cornerstone of the way Cosimo does business has earned him a network of devoted customers and exceptionally loyal staff. Host on The Social and former Terroni manager Jessica Allen perhaps sums him up best when she says, “I’ll never tire seeing the childlike joy and pride that washes over Cosimo when he feeds loved ones and strangers alike. It’s contagious. His no-nonsense smarts, generosity and warmth are as epic as the restaurant empire he’s created.
Born and raised in Toronto by parents who immigrated from Calabria, Cosimo has always felt deeply connected to Italy. After leaving high school at 17, Cosimo started to work in restaurants to make enough money to visit Italy with his friends over the summer. He loved Italy and Italian food so much that his dream was to open his own place as soon as possible to share a real Italian experience with his Canadian people.
In 1992, at the age of 25, Cosimo opened the first Terroni restaurant on Queen Street West with his good friend Paolo Scoppio. 30 years later Cosimo has nine unique Terroni, Sud Forno and Spaccio locations in Toronto and Los Angeles along with Stock T.C in collaboration with Cumbrae’s and Porta, Toronto’s first Italian meal delivery service. Cosimo spends every Friday he can at Spaccio East hand-making panzerotti with Chef Gio Alonzi. Their corner of the kitchen is a hive of activity where raucous laughter radiates warmth and a place where everyone is welcome to stop by and join in. There are no airs and graces with Cosimo, he is a genuinely caring person with time for everyone. His passion for food is infectious and it is clear to everyone around him that his convictions drive all that he does.
The infamous ‘no modification, no substitution’ policy stems from these convictions, from his unerring respect for everyone who has come before and has worked to keep Italian traditions alive. Cosimo is no campaigner; he’s not interested in converting people to his way of thinking. He simply wants the food to be how it has been for generations. Part of this also means giving his customers the best, even if that means making less. Italian cooking is all about simplicity and high-quality, fresh ingredients and Cosimo takes great pride in sourcing the very best for all his guests from wine to olive oil to organic San Marzano tomatoes that cost twice as much, but taste so much better. When you enter any of Cosimo’s locations you are no longer an employee or a customer, you are family.
This cornerstone of the way Cosimo does business has earned him a network of devoted customers and exceptionally loyal staff. Host on The Social and former Terroni manager Jessica Allen perhaps sums him up best when she says, “I’ll never tire seeing the childlike joy and pride that washes over Cosimo when he feeds loved ones and strangers alike. It’s contagious. His no-nonsense smarts, generosity and warmth are as epic as the restaurant empire he’s created.
Terroni (“of the earth” in Italian) are bricks of pressed, fresh virgin soil that take on a yellowish hue once they’ve dried in the sun. They were originally used for patching up non-structural holes in houses made of terracotta (baked clay), or stone. Southern Italian workers not only made the terroni bricks — they also used them to build their own modest homes.
Over time, the word terroni evolved into a derogatory term used by people of the industrial north when referring to southern Italian labourers. Ironically, these bricks have recently acquired ecological value because they are not baked and provide excellent insulation.
Paolo was born in Bari, Puglia, while Cosimo’s family comes from San Giorgio Morgeto in Calabria. They chose the name Terroni for their restaurant as both an homage to their southern Italian heritage and as a brazen wink to their northerly Italian neighbours.
From day one, our mission was to offer a true, authentic Italian food experience. As a result, we found ourselves saying “no” to some requests by our customers. While it is fully embraced by some, at times it is met with resistance.
There are two reasons why we do this. The first one is because many of the dishes we make are deeply rooted in Italian regional cooking and we’ve never been interested in re-inventing them. If we accommodated modifications, the dishes would no longer be authentic, they’d no longer be something we felt confident serving to one of our guests; and they’d no longer be “Terroni”. At times, this attention has been confused with poor customer service. On the contrary, it has little to do with a lack of decorum and everything to do with the desire to stay true to what has been passed on to us.
The second reason is our of practicality. Our kitchens get very busy. If modifications are accommodated, disruptions and mistakes on the line will assuredly follow which slows down both our efficiency and the quality of our service.
A number of Italian recipes involve a tomato-based sauce, which depending on the quality, can make or break a dish. Although grown throughout Italy, we source our tomatoes from the warm Mediterranean climate of the south where they are cultivated organically under the sun. With quality and consistency top of mind, we choose the crop that best matches the Terroni tomato profile you have become accustomed to. We work with three to four small to medium sized, family-run suppliers, mainly in Puglia and Campania where the DOP San Marzano tomato variety is from.
Our 100% extra virgin olive oil is an authentically Italian product made by local farmers and artisans. It starts with the Coratina olives, a DOP olive cultivated in “Terra di Bari”. This variety is grown in an organic olive grove just outside of Bari, Puglia and owned by a close family friend of ours, and is exclusive to us. This particularly strong-tasting olive is cultivated with great care and in strict adherence to the Protected Designation of Origin guidelines (DOP). We are often in Italy when the olives are hand-picked and within hours, they are cold pressed delivering the purest quality possible. Extra virgin means the olive oil cannot have an acidity level that exceeds more than 1%. Ours has an acidity level between 0.24% to 0.27%.
Flour is the backbone of Italian cooking. Our flour comes from an Italian medium-sized mill in the Marche region of Italy. This mill is small enough to practice traditional and authentic ways of milling flour, but also big enough to produce the large quantities and various types of flour needed for our different uses. The producer has a stretch of land dedicated solely to growing wheat for us and our master baker, Giuliano Pediconi, works alongside them and mills the flour himself so we can tailor the outcome to our specific needs.
Terroni, Sud Forno and Spaccio go hand in hand with tradition. As our locations grew and our brands developed over the last 30 years, we’ve never compromised on our commitment to quality and tradition. Even though we’ve grown as much as we have from that first Queen Street West location, we have never strayed from our core values.
