I still remember my first family visit to Piazza Tomasso. My parents, my sister, and I trekked from Chomedey to Decarie Boulevard — then a bustling strip of Montreal restaurants where the names alone meant something: Orange Julep, Miss Montreal, Ruby Foo’s, A&W, Ports of Call. I knew them all. I had never once eaten Italian food in a restaurant, but I knew about Piazza Tomasso, because Magic Tom Auburn — the host of one of my favourite afternoon TV shows — performed there. To a kid still learning to read, that made it less a restaurant and more a place where something magical happened.
Before we even went inside Piazza Tomasso that first day, I watched waitresses taking orders and carrying plates out to the cars in one of the restaurant’s two parking lots. I knew that ritual — A&W and Orange Julep served everyone that way — but I couldn’t picture eating spaghetti in a car. We chose the dining room instead, away from the little snack-bar setup the car service seemed to run from, and stepped into the noise and warmth of a full room.
It was probably 1964 or ’65. Almost as soon as we sat down, the server set down a basket of bread and a basket of thin sticks that also looked like bread. I was told to try one. These “sticks” turned out to be breadsticks — another first — and I can still feel the snap of them. I dipped a couple in butter while we waited.
When my plate arrived, the sauce sat on top of the “noodles,” not mixed through the way my mother always did it for me at home. At that age, I was quick to reject anything unfamiliar — or even familiar food presented in a new way — so I hesitated. But my sister, whose opinion I worshipped on just about everything, was already lost in her plate. So I dug in. It was love at first bite, and I have been chasing that first taste ever since.
On the drive home, I peppered my mother with questions: could she make her sauce taste like that, and did Steinberg’s sell those breadsticks? (Steinberg’s was our store — my father worked there, running the catalogue for their rewards programme, the Pinky Stamps, a cousin of Gold Star Stamps.) She promised to try, and on her next shopping trip, a box of breadsticks appeared in the cupboard. The sauce she never quite cracked — but I didn’t mind, because the real thing was always waiting at the restaurant.
And I went back, many, many times. Around 1976, they opened a second Piazza Tomasso location downtown in the new Les Terrasses mall — short-lived, and maybe a sign of trouble to come, though I didn’t see it then. That summer was a good one: every other Friday, my friend Michael and I had a standing dinner date at the Decarie location, and the downtown spot joined my rotation of post-movie suppers alongside the stalwart Murray’s. Both felt like they would be Montreal institutions forever.
They weren’t. The Decarie location closed in 2012. For a few more years, you could still buy the frozen sauce in the grocery aisle — not quite the dining room, but close enough to bring it all back — until the company that licensed it went under, too, and the taste I had measured every other sauce against for nearly sixty years was simply gone.
Or so I thought. For years, people traded attempts at the Piazza Tomasso sauce recipe online, and none of them came close — until this spring, when renowned cookbook author Marcy Goldman announced she had finally found the secret. I had to try it. I found my way back to that flavour, more or less, and that turned out to be a story of its own.
And there’s one more thread to pull. On that first visit, I still hadn’t tried pizza. Piazza Tomasso had its own take on it — Pizza Plus — and that, too, is something I mean to bring back as this Heritage Series chapter unfolds.
