Tidings Magazine

By day, Elena Faita-Venditelli runs one of the most original hardware stores you’re likely to come across: the Quincaillerie Dante, a family-owned Montreal institution that caters to gourmands on one side of the shop and to tradition-minded hunters on the other. A place that harks back to a time when people still made food from scratch.

By night, Elena runs a traditional Italian cooking school. The formula is simple: “I give you some recipes, I teach you my way of food — that’s all I do.”

Fifteen years ago, Elena’s daughter Cristina suggested an in-store pasta-making demonstration as a way of drawing a greater variety of people into the store, which up until the late eighties had catered mainly to the Italian and Greek families of Montreal’s Little Italy. “They’ll see you doing it and see how easy it is.” The idea proved a hit — it’s been running every Saturday at 2 pm since — and soon people were clamoring for tips on sauces to go with the pasta. In 1993, Cristina and Elena worked all summer to prepare the building next door. They launched the school in time for tomato season.

Over the years, she’s taught thousands of people, many of them busy professionals — “nurses, social workers, lawyers, their daughters; a mix of everything, really” — who came to her “with no knowledge of cooking.”

Up until recently, she was working 80 hours a week in the store and teaching 140 classes a year— at a rate of 5 nights a week through autumn, winter and spring. Though she’s cutting back on her hours at the store (after 46 years), she shows no sign of wanting to teach less. How does she do it, after working all day? “As soon as I’m around food, I have energy again, because it’s a passion for me.”

The classroom, a large ground-floor apartment with an open kitchen that looks just as cosy as yours or mine (but for the six-burner gas range), makes students immediately feel at ease.

When the class starts, Elena proceeds to chop, slice and knead away, all the while bantering with her students (many of them repeat visitors) like old friends. “I love being with people,” Elena tells me. With the help of an assistant — often her son Stefano — she will whip up four or five dishes that students enjoy at the long communal table at the end of the night, with a glass of red, of course.