Piazza of their dreams De Nardi family celebrates a half century in the food-and-wine biz, from humble beginnings to culinary destination By: David Sanderson Posted: 7:00 PM CST Friday, Nov. 25, 2022

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/11/2022 (664 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Before we get to today’s story toasting the De Nardi family’s 50th anniversary in the food-and-wine biz, Ugo and Maria De Nardi, who along with their grown children Tom and Liana own and operate specialty grocery centre Piazza De Nardi at 1360 Taylor Ave., would like to acknowledge the pivotal role Transit Tom played in their many accomplishments.

Maria was 18 years old in 1961, living with her Italian-born parents on Jessie Avenue, in Winnipeg’s Earl Grey neighbourhood. Bright and early every Sunday morning, she would catch a bus at the corner of Pembina Highway and Daly Street, to attend mass at Holy Rosary Church, then located on Sherbrook Street. Ugo, whose parents hailed from Treviso, Italy, was part of the congregation there, as well, and because he lived a few streets over from Maria, he often boarded the same, church-bound bus as her.

One Sunday, after taking a seat near the driver, Maria noticed Ugo, two years her senior, looking over at her with a smile on his face. Though they’d never been formally introduced, she knew him to say hello, so she returned his gaze. It was at that point he patted an empty spot on the bench beside him, as if signalling her to join him.

“He likes to tell everybody how I used to stare at him on the bus, and that’s why he invited me over, but that’s not the way I remember it,” Maria says with a chuckle, seated across from her son in a banquet room on Piazza De Nardi’s mezzanine level. “In response, I made a motion with my own hand, meaning if he wanted to sit next to me, he’d have to be the one who walked over. That’s precisely what he did, and we’ve been together ever since.”

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To say that Piazza De Nardi and the family’s accompanying operation, wholesaler Mondo Foods, started from a hole in the ground is as close to the truth as it gets.

Not long after he and Maria tied the knot in 1962, Ugo got a job digging tunnels for the city’s water and sewage systems. It was extremely arduous work, “50 feet a day, just him and his spade,” his son says. On the other hand, the pay was good, Maria pipes in, and it afforded them the opportunity to purchase their first home, on Beaverbrook Street in River Heights, when they were in their early 20s.

In 1971 Ugo and Maria, by then the parents of two, agreed he would eventually need to seek other employment, something that wouldn’t be so hard on his aching back and limbs. They came close to buying an existing bicycle shop that summer — he was an avid cyclist when he was younger, and thought that might be a good fit — but after that deal failed to materialize, they shifted their attention to a 600-square-foot, ethnic grocery store for sale at 676 Sargent Ave., immediately next door to chocolate-makers/confectioners Morden’s.

“Zero, zip,” Maria replies, when asked what she and Ugo knew about the retail game, when they took over La Grotta del Formaggio, as it continued to be called, in the spring of 1972. It was a costly venture, mind you, so Ugo continued to work underground in order to make ends meet. That left his wife as the store’s lone employee until he joined her there full time a few years later.

“You want to talk about women pioneers in the Italian-Mediterranean grocery business, you’re looking at her,” says Tom, who, beginning at age eight, headed to his parents’ store directly from school, to spend a few hours doing homework and playing with his sister, while they waited for their mother to take them home. “She was dealing with all these sales people from Toronto and Montreal, in a completely male-dominated industry. Initially they were like, ‘Can we talk to your husband?’ but over time, she gained their respect and then some.”

Maria guesses it was 1975 when she and Ugo first brought in grapes from California, to sell to individuals interested in producing homemade wine. The move proved so successful (one year they went through 25 trailers worth of grapes, at 1,152 cases per load) that they added a wholesale division to the mix, which enabled them to also sell grapes to their fellow independent grocers, who recognized a good thing when they saw it.

Within a couple years, Mondo Foods, the name they picked for that side of things, had branched out to include dozens of imported goods such as stewed tomatoes, olive oil and premium cold cuts. If you headed to a pizza restaurant in the mid- to late-1970s, it was highly likely what you dove into was prepared with Italian-style cheese sourced through Mondo Foods, Tom contends, as his parents supplied the likes of Santa Lucia, Mamma Mia and Colosseo Ristorante Italiano with almost everything in their kitchens.

Tom, who started running deliveries for his parents at age 16, says the ongoing success of Mondo Foods necessitated a series of expansions over the next 15 years. They relocated to a larger building on Sargent in 1978, half of which was devoted to the retail store and half to the wholesale wing. They outgrew that space fairly quickly, which caused them to buy a warehouse on St. James Street, expressly to house Mondo Foods. They remained there until 1989, before moving to their present location, a 45,000-square-foot facility on Otter Street, in the Fort Garry Industrial Park.

“By the early ’90s, we had really hit our peak,” Tom goes on. “We were bringing in product for restaurants and grocery stores from northwestern Ontario to B.C., we had turned our parents’ humble, little store into this multi-million-dollar operation… we were like, ‘Wow, can you believe it?’”

Unfortunately, their progress came to a screeching halt around 1994, when major companies they’d been dealing with, conglomerates such as Canada Safeway and Loblaw’s, shifted gears. In an effort to reduce costs, they decided one by one that they no longer needed a wholesaler like Mondo Foods to supply them with goods, and, going forward, would deal directly with manufacturers.

“No word of a lie, we literally lost over $1 million in business, practically overnight,” Maria says. “Worse, it destroyed our feelings, because we’d always put so much of ourselves into the business, by building strong, personal relationships with people we were dealing with. How do you come back from something like that?”

Good question.

One of the ways was by taking a trip to Europe. Shortly after the provincial government announced it would begin issuing licences to individuals interested in opening private wine stores, the De Nardis successfully applied, then packed their bags for Italy, where they hit vineyard after vineyard, to source stock.

The wine component they established in their existing Sargent Avenue store proved to be a “nice little addition,” Tom says. Following that, they sat down as a family to have a lengthy discussion about what else they could do, to rebound from their losses. That was when the four of them concluded the time had come to construct something for themselves, a “showpiece,” they called it.

“It would be a larger store than we had already, yes, but we didn’t want to just build a box,” Maria says. “It had to be someplace people desired to go — a destination point, of sorts — and that’s when the concept of an authentic, Italian piazza started to take root. We just had to find the right location.”

Every day on his way to work, Tom would drive past an overgrown field at the southeast corner of Taylor Avenue and Waverley Street. When he was halted by a passing train, which occurred regularly, he would glance to his left and think what a perfect spot it would be for what they’d been discussing, what with its proximity to River Heights, Fort Garry and Linden Woods.

When a “for sale” sign went up there in 1997, he approached his parents and sister, to let them know he’d found the perfect spot for the piazza of their dreams.

“It wasn’t a cheap venture, that was for sure,” Tom says, crediting his mother for the overall design of Piazza De Nardi, which combined a wine boutique, bakery, butcher station, coffee bar and general grocery store, all under one roof, when it opened in September 1999.

“Admittedly, it was overbuilt, what with ceramic tile floors and all matter of glitz,” he goes on. “But we wanted it to be a jewel for the city, which was the way Susan Thompson, our mayor at the time, described it, when she was helping us cut through all the red tape to get things off the ground.”

Piazza De Nardi, which has undergone a couple expansions in its 24-year history, continues to welcome first-timers almost every day — people who ooh and aah over foodstuffs they can’t get elsewhere in the city, whether that’s Mediterranean sea bass, 30-month aged prosciutto or — yes, please and thanks — blanc bleu de Rizet goat blue cheese. As pleasing as that is, mother and son say it’s their loyal clientele, many of whom first visited with their parents when they were in the West End, and now arrive with their own children (“Mom, can we get some cannoli?”) in tow, who’ve kept them going for 50 years.

Tom smiles, recalling how for years his father, now 81, thought nothing of driving elderly customers home, and carrying their groceries, even if that included a sack of flour or crates of fruit, up however many flights of stairs. If need be, he’d even stay and grate their cheese, before heading back to work.

“When I see people’s eyes light up, which, to me, means they’re getting pleasure out of something we’ve done, it just warms my heart,” says Maria, who, in her late 70s, continues to report for work as many as six days a week. “I’m an Aquarian — we tend to think ahead — so I’m always wondering what we can do next, not only for people of Italian descent, but for all Winnipeggers.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca