Toronto's best pasta restaurant just announced it's closing soon
Toronto's most celebrated and widely-loved pasta restaurant just announced that it's closing to the public after nearly a decade of slinging the city's best pasta.
If ever there were a time to emotionally insulate oneself with a heaping bowl of pasta, it's now: Famiglia Baldassarre founder Leandro Baldassarre just announced that the restaurant's Michelin-recommended lunch service will soon be a thing of the past.
What began as a pasta wholesale operation for Baldassarre back in 2010 eventually blossomed into nothing short of a phenomenon when the business's lusted-over lunch service —available for just three hours, four days a week— usurped the raw pasta as the shop's main claim to fame.
Nowadays, you'll seldom find Famiglia Baldassarre's cozy Geary Avenue haunt without a line snaking all the way around it at lunchtime hours. People just can't seem to get enough of Baldassarre's rotating roundup of pasta dishes.
No one, except Leandro Baldassarre himself, it seems.
On Monday, July 14, Baldassarre took to Instagram to announce that big changes are on the way for his business — namely, the removal of its lunch service.
"I'm never nervous making these videos, but I'm nervous today because this is actually a big piece of news," Baldassarre says at the start of the nearly 10-minute-long video.
He then explains that the restaurant will serve its last lunch before its annual August vacation on Aug. 14, but this time, they won't be coming back.
"Baldassarre, as you know it, will be closed, and that will be the last lunch."
He's quick to assure that the business itself isn't closing, but rather will be investing wholly into expanding Baldassarre's wholesale operations, with a primary focus on getting their pasta in stores.
It may not be goodbye for good, though. Baldassarre assures that, "I'm going to be cooking one way or another," so you'll still have chances to get coveted bites of Baldassarre pasta from time to time, "but lunch, as you know it, is done."
There's still about a month's worth of lunch services left, so you'll still have a chance to score it for yourself, just be prepared to endure the line.
Famiglia Baldassarre is located at 122 Geary Ave.
Hector Vasquez
