Pomodora is the cooking of three women, across two countries, sixty years apart. We cook the food they cooked. We don't change it because it doesn't need changing.
Nonna Lucia ran a six-table kitchen attached to the family's olive press in Cisternino. She cooked from a single notebook of recipes she'd written by hand, half in dialect, half in shorthand. The orecchiette recipe on our menu is hers. The ragù is hers. The way we treat tomatoes when they come into season. That's hers too.
Lucia's daughter Rosa came to Toronto in 1989, brought the notebook, and cooked for friends at home for twenty years before opening anything to the public. She still works the pass on Friday and Saturday evenings. She'll tell you the eggs aren't right, or the bread is right, or the wine list needs one more Lambrusco. We listen.
Marta is Rosa's daughter and the chef who runs our kitchen day-to-day. She trained at the Italian Culinary Institute, staged in Bologna and Naples, and came home to cook the food she grew up with. The menu turns with her. What she finds at market on Tuesday morning is what we cook Tuesday night.
“Cook what the season gives you. Cook it slow. Feed people you love.”Lucia, 1968
We rolled the pasta this morning. We will roll it again tomorrow. The ragù has been on the stove since six. The bread came out twenty minutes before service.
We don't deconstruct anything. We don't plate with tweezers. We cook food the way our family has cooked food for sixty years, and we do it with care, every single service.
The room is small. The menu is short. The wine list is Italian. That's the whole shape of it.
