‘How blessed I am’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/06/2020 (1977 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Joe Loschiavo, currently celebrating his 30th anniversary as the owner of Pasquale’s Italian Ristorante at 109 Marion St., is a hugger, always has been.

Knowing that, it comes as little surprise to learn the toughest thing for him lately hasn’t been devising a way to make ends meet during a pandemic.

Instead it’s been the inability to wrap his arms around his longtime regulars and give them a heartfelt embrace.

“When all this began to break, when we saw what was happening with COVID, we made the difficult decision to shut things down completely,” says the married father of three, seated in the main-floor dining area of his multi-level restaurant, which includes a spacious, rooftop patio overlooking St. Boniface.

“That final weekend, the one just after St. Patrick’s Day, I told my staff to head home and do what they had to in terms of filing for unemployment, but not before going into the freezer and taking whatever they wanted for them and their families.”

Loschiavo, 51, says the following few weeks were hard on him, as he tried to figure out what his next move was going to be. Should he begin offering delivery and curbside pick up? If he did, would people even show up, or would spaghetti and meatballs be the last thing on their mind?

He received an answer to that query soon enough when his phone started to “go crazy” with calls and text messages from Winnipeggers wondering just how long they were going to have to go without “their” extra-large Pasquale’s Special pizza or Forgetaboutit panzerotti.

“I fully admit I had a bit of an emotional breakdown when we reopened after being closed for a full month,” he says, taking a sip of soda water.

“At first I was doing a lot of the pick-up and delivery myself and to have all these regular customers wishing me well with tears in their eyes was simply overwhelming. I’m Italian, reaching out to people is what we do, and not being able to shake somebody’s hand or give them a pat on the back as thank you was next to impossible.

“I wouldn’t want anyone who runs a business to go through something like this again but to fully realize how blessed I am to have all these wonderful people in my life is something you can’t put a price on.”

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Loschiavo’s parents, Francesco and Serafina, moved to Winnipeg in 1954 from their hometown of Amato, Italy. Parents of nine — Joe’s the third youngest — they both worked outside the family home. Francesco ran Roma Auto Body while Serafina operated a West Broadway grocery mart along with her sisters.

(Loschiavo laughs when asked how one can afford to feed a family of nine kids, remarking that it’s easy, you just buy a grocery store.)

Loschiavo can’t remember a time when he didn’t enjoy watching his mother and grandmother in the kitchen preparing meatballs or rolling pizza dough. After completing Grade 12, he landed a cook’s position at Gaffer’s, a popular restaurant and lounge located in Lockport. He recalls the evening members of his family, 20 altogether including cousins, arrived there for dinner.

“My dad was actually surprised I was the one preparing everybody’s meal. I think he thought my job was in the back somewhere peeling potatoes,” he says.

A week or so later, father and son had a conversation that went something like this: Francesco asked him if being a chef was something he was interested in as a career choice. When Loschiavo answered yes, he’d love that, his dad responded hey, you never know, maybe a restaurant will come up for sale one day.

“One day” arrived in the summer of 1990 when his mother spotted an ad in the newspaper announcing Pasquale’s, which opened in Osborne Village in 1977, had just hit the market.

The original owners, the Loscerbo family, were from the same part of Italy as her and her husband, so she suggested the three of them go there for a bite to check things out.

“Even though it was 13 years old, Pasquale’s was still super popular in large part because of its outdoor patio, the first of its kind in Winnipeg,” Loschiavo says. “By then Chris Loscerbo was running it for his dad Pasquale, but because Chris had suffered a horrible accident a few years prior that left him badly injured, he’d decided the time was right to sell.”

Loschiavo was 21 years old when he became Pasquale’s new owner. He admits the first six months were a challenge, in particular, getting employees who’d been there for five or 10 years to respect this “young whippersnapper who was suddenly calling the shots.”

While changing the name was never a consideration — his great-grandfather’s name was Pasquale so it was a perfect fit — the menu was another story. Once you’ve tasted his mother’s cooking there’s no comparison, he says proudly, so he enlisted her to pass along as much of her wisdom as possible to the restaurant’s cooks.

“The toughest part of teaching everyone her recipes was the fact nothing had ever been written down. These were dishes she’d been preparing for decades using a pinch of this and a dash of that. She knew exactly how much basil or garlic to use but of course there were no precise measurements to speak of.”

When he took over, Loschiavo signed a five-year lease on the property, which, some may recall, consisted of a pair of former two-storey homes joined in the middle by a memorable, narrow passageway that took you from the restaurant side of things to the lounge area. Because he preferred the idea of owning versus renting — he was responsible for paying the taxes and utility bills, as well as his monthly rent — he began keeping an eye out for vacant restaurant space elsewhere in the city during the final year of his lease.

It was around that time his father, who died in 2018 at age 85, gave him a piece of advice he remembers to this day.

“Given the arrangement I’d signed, I had a lot of bills piling up and wasn’t entirely sure I was even going to make it to the end of my lease. Dad said if I didn’t want to do this any longer I shouldn’t be afraid to tell him,” he says, noting his parents had put their home up as collateral when he took out a loan to buy Pasquale’s in the first place.

“He said not to worry about what was still owed and how the most important thing in life is to be happy. That’s when I knew I wasn’t stopping, that I was going to continue on and do whatever I had to do to make Pasquale’s a success.”

Loschiavo moved to his present-day location, the one-time home of another Italian restaurant, Da Vinci’s, in 1995. Radio personality Joe Aiello vividly recalls taking part in an event there, not long after the restaurant’s grand re-opening.

“We did a radio promo on St. Patrick’s Day with a twist: St. Pasquale’s Day,” Aiello says when reached at home. “Instead of Irish coffee we served cappuccino, and instead of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding it was pizza and pasta. It was a packed house (and) a lot of listeners thought the Italian twist was awesome. Joe and I had a ton of laughs that day.”

Loschiavo, who knows as many customers by order as he does by name, (“Here comes lasagna and garlic toast,” he’ll shout to a server when he spots somebody parking their car out front) says there are pros and cons to being around as long as Pasquale’s has. The pros are watching a young couple arrive there on a first date, return to mark their engagement and come in again a few years later, this time with a baby in tow. Every once in a while, though, you lose customers, too, he says.

“Being so close to St. Boniface Hospital, we actually train our servers to watch for folks who might be going through something traumatic,” he continues. “Sometimes they’ll stop in for a bite after spending the day saying goodbye to a parent or spouse, and are just looking for somebody to talk to. When something like that happens, a meal on the house is the least we can do.”

One more thing; if you go to Pasquale’s for dinner, and are seated on the patio surrounded by pots of tomato and basil plants, don’t be alarmed if others seated nearby break into a rousing chorus of That’s Amore, singing about the moon hitting their eye like a big pizza pie.

“There’s a special Rat Pack station on satellite radio we tune into all the time, that plays nothing but Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett… that sort of thing,” says Loschiavo, who christened one of his pizza selections the Louis Primavera in honour of another of his favourite singers. “I say it all the time, how coming here isn’t like going to work. I get the food, I get the music, I get the people… I get to be Italian every day of the week.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca