When New West residents watched mounds of snow bring the city to a standstill in November 2022, Gastronomia Italia introduced an item that was on many people’s minds – warm soup. .
As part of its "comfort soup season," the restaurant added tomato, potato leek, winter vegetable, minestrone and chicken noodle soups to its menu.
Though the new line of soups was part of an experiment at the nine-month-old restaurant in downtown New West, chef and owner Delbert Cirfera said it’s been so well received by customers that soup may continue to be on the menu well beyond winter.
Every day, Cirfera and his team are at the restaurant's kitchen by 5 a.m. baking fresh bread and cooking soup from scratch.
The soups are all made Italian style, "not the North American style," said Cirfera.
But what’s the difference?
Cirfera took the example of Gastronomia Italia's tomato soup — “In Italy, we do the 'pappa al pomodoro,' a soup made by cooking the bread in the tomato soup.”
“It is very very different — much more dense than the North American tomato soup.”
The ingredients are kept to a minimum though, he added. Onions, San Marzano tomatoes, some chicken stock and a little heavy cream is all that goes into the tomato soup. “We don’t use any other kind of ingredient in the Italian way.”
And, he stressed, “We don’t cook the soup for hours.”
“The soup is cooked for 15 minutes. No more.”
As per Cirfera, when you cook the soup for too long, you lose the nutrition of the veggies, the flavour and even the colour.
The restaurant’s minestrone soup is done the traditional Milanese way — cooked with a bunch of fresh vegetables and ground meat, he said.
The winter vegetable soup, made with seasonal vegetables like leek, carrot, onion, green and Napa cabbages, potato, kabocha squash and more, is cooked with carnaroli rice (a type of rice that's grown in Northern Italy and used to make risotto) to make it more dense.
One of the most popular soups is the potato leek that’s cooked with guanciale, an Italian cured meat made from pork jowl — one that’s used in the pasta dish carbonara.
“It’s (guanciale) very fatty. So, we melt it until we have these small pieces that are very crispy. And we add all that fat into the soup. That gives a lot of extra flavour.”
Cirfera, who has 15 years of experience working in the culinary field, opened Gastronomia Italia in early 2022. Ever since, he has been adding new products to the menu almost weekly to gauge what the New West community likes. And winter soups, as it turns out, are definitely on the list.
But what happens in the summer then?
The soups will stay. Only, they will be the cold kind, said Cirfera.
“Like gazpacho, or cold tomato soup.”
Gastronomia Italia is located at 601 Columbia St. Every soup serving comes with a side of the restaurant’s signature focaccia bread — complete with olives and parmesan reggiano.
