If you ever find yourself in Woodbridge, Ciao Roma Pizza is a must-have food experience. For over 10 years, owner Rob Federici has been making Roman-style pizza al taglio. This pizza service is fast, by the slice and weighed, allowing you to choose how much pizza your stomach desires — just like the Romans do.
It all started in 2010 when Rob travelled to Italy in search of the world’s best pizza. After sampling different kinds of pizza far and wide, he finally came across a pizza al taglio joint offering light, airy and crunchy slices — something he hadn’t tasted or seen before in Toronto. It took a lot of convincing, but the pizzeria took Rob under its wing, teaching him their ways. Eventually, his teacher, a master pizzaiolo from Rome, came back to Canada to help him with his business, and the rest is history.
We chatted with Rob to learn the ways of the pizza business. Keep scrolling to read more.
How did you get your start in the restaurant industry?
When I was 18, I used to go to this restaurant with my family for years. One day my mom said, “Why don’t you just try going to work at the restaurant as a server, it can be fun,” so I just tried it. I always loved food and I grew up in the kitchen with my grandparents and parents. I was helping them a lot in the kitchen and was always attracted to food and cooking. Once I started working as a server in the restaurant, I just fell in love with the industry and I knew that I always wanted some part of it. I went to school to learn how to be an entrepreneur [studying] marketing and entrepreneurial studies. I knew I wanted to open a business, I just didn’t know what. I loved the restaurant industry so much that I thought of doing a fast-casual [restaurant] because I know how difficult it can be to run a full-service one. This would be something a little more manageable, especially because I was starting at such a young age.
Explain your vision: why were you in search of the best pizza in 2010?
Anyone that knows me knows that when I do something, I go all the way [like I did when I moved] to Italy to try and find the best pizza recipe. My dad is from Rome, we have a lot of family there, so I would visit every year. I was very familiar with this type of service — pizza al taglio where they serve it by weight. The restaurant scene in Toronto was so evolved and there were so many great concepts and restaurants, but I was baffled as to why [pizza al taglio] wasn’t here yet. It didn’t make sense to me because the product is fantastic. I spent four months in Rome, two of them travelling around Rome eating at every place I could find. Then one day, I walked into this place and I was just blown away. I didn’t even try the pizza and I knew that was the place I had to learn from. I just kept going back until they agreed to teach me and so I did a course for a couple of months where I worked 60 hours a week. Then I came back [to Canada] and found a location, set up the shop and that was 11 years ago.
How did you learn to make pizza al taglio?
Working 60 hours a week for two months straight, you become good friends with a person. The guy that taught me, it wasn’t actually his pizzeria; he was the chef there. It was his recipe, his way of running the kitchen that he implemented at that pizzeria. He worked in other places around the world for a couple of months to train like in New York but it didn’t work out, but he always wanted to leave Italy. When I finished my course and was ready to open, he said he could come to Toronto for a few months to help out because he knew opening a business is tough. I said, “That’s a great idea, but I’m going to do a sponsorship because if you like it and you want to stay, you have that option.” I got the sponsorship luckily because he decided to stay. And now he’s in the process of getting his Canadian citizenship. The first time we went [to Italy], I was 10 and we would always talk about that pizza al taglio and how it was the greatest pizza we’d ever had. It was a constant theme over the years — reminiscing about that pizza because we never had anything like that here. Whenever we talk about Italy, we talk about family and the Colosseum and how great that was — but that pizza, I can’t wait to go back and have that pizza. Once I was 18 and I started going back on my own, that was a mandatory stop. If we went to Rome, we had to go get pizza al taglio. We had to get our fill because once we left, we weren’t going to be eating it for another year or two years.
What is pizza al taglio?
Pizza al taglio is a type of service style [ … ] It’s basically where you come into the restaurant and there is a big display of several different pizzas. You then choose by weight what you want [by] telling the server how big or how small of each type of pizza you’d like. They cut it up, weigh it and finish it off in the oven and you take it to go. It’s a faster type of service because the pizza is already ready and just needs to be warmed up [which] finishes off the last 10 per cent of cooking. Pizza al taglio is also known to be a different style of pizza. It’s a little bit thicker, but it’s very light and airy. When you finish it off in the oven, you get a nice crispy bottom. When you bite in, you get that crunch, but it’s very airy and light, so it’s the best of [both] worlds. Whereas when you have your thin round pizza, you get that thin crust, there’s no density or airiness to it.
Why did you choose to focus on pizza al taglio instead of pizza tonda Romana, the famous Roman paper thin pizza, with Ciao Roma?
If you eat them side by side, there’s no comparison. The dough is everything and when you bite into a thin pizza – don’t get me wrong, it’s good, I love it, there’s a place for it in the market for sure — but, it just doesn’t have a wow factor to it. It seems like every other pizza that you can eat, there’s nothing that differentiates it. When you bite into pizza al taglio, you feel like you’re biting into something that’s like… Oh my god, you’re biting into a more traditional pizza. It brings people back to when your grandparents used to make pizza at home, but on steroids. Once you take that bite, you automatically know why you would choose one over the other one. I think it actually pays homage to our [Italian] ancestry and how people used to make pizza back in the day — it’s an art form in a sense and you don’t see that often at all. That’s one of the main reasons why [Ciao Roma] became so popular from day one; you see the difference, and there’s no turning back after that. It’s like, you go drive a Ferrari and then you go back and drive a Honda Civic.
Tell me about how you make your dough. Why is it so different from other pizza doughs?
Unfortunately, I can’t tell you the process — you would have to come to work for me and sign a confidentiality agreement. But I can tell you that it’s a four-day proprietary process from start to finish and the recipe is unique to us. It’s like Coca Cola’s secret recipe. We keep it in a locker somewhere very deep, where no one can find it. That’s what helps to yield that very light, airy dough that everyone’s come to love.
What are some Italian ingredients you use?
The main one is our flour, it is essential to our product. We have that brought in from Italy. The ironic thing is we have the best natural and unprocessed flour in Canada. That’s used as the base which gets shipped to Italy, and then they refine and add the ingredients to make this unique type of flour that’s for our product specifically and then they ship it back to Canada. We would never be able to make our product with just straight Canadian flour or the doppio zero that most pizzerias use for their round pizzas.
Choose one — pizza rossa or pizza bianca?
I would have to say rossa if I had to choose one.
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