Georgia Straight

September 24, 2009

Excerpt from "Neighbourhood restaurants thrive in Vancouver"

Lombardo's Pizzeria & Ristorante

Even though it’s become famous for its wood-oven-fired pizza, Lombardo’s Pizzeria & Ristorante didn’t exactly set Commercial Drive on fire when it opened nearly a quarter of a century ago.

“We opened August 15 in ’86, right in the middle of Expo,” Patti Lombardo recalls. “It wasn’t planned that way, because it was a bad time to open. Everyone was at Expo—nobody was doing anything else.”

Lombardo’s (1641 Commercial Drive) found itself competing against Vancouver’s world’s fair thanks to delays in the construction of Il Mercato, the flamingo-pink mini mall in which the restaurant is located. Looking back, Lombardo remembers thinking that Expo wasn’t the only thing keeping her up at night during the restaurant’s launch.

“They showed us what the project [Il Mercato] was going to look like, but when they built it, it wasn’t exactly what they had showed us,” she says. “It was a big problem for us, opening up in the middle of something that we were stuck with. It wasn’t what we had in mind, but we’ve had to live with it.”

Lombardo’s survived a couple of challenging early years to become a Commercial Drive institution. The big drawing card is, of course, the pizza, which is cooked in a brick oven heated by burning wood.

“There was no one using a proper wood oven in town at the time we opened,” Lombardo says. “The city gave us permission to build one, but I don’t think they meant to. I don’t think they realized it would be an actual wood-burning oven.”

Designed by Lombardo’s engineer uncle, the brick oven burns at around 700 degrees during peak dining hours. While it’s the wood that makes it good, the restaurant has ultimately become one of Vancouver’s treasures because things are kept fresh and simple. Lombardo’s was one of the first places in the city to realize that a three-inch layer of melted mozzarella and a pound of No Name–brand salami do not a better pizza make.

“The philosophy when we opened—and it still is—is that we try to do it very simple,” Lombardo says. “We try to use local produce when we can, and we rarely change what we do. For example, we use Bosa salami, and if we can’t get it, we won’t use anything else.”

It’s a formula that’s made Lombardo’s some heavy-hitting fans over the years, she says, including the late Urban Peasant James Barber and a certain North Vancouver–raised rock star.

“Bryan Adams lives in London now, but he used to come all the time,” Lombardo says. “He used to come Tuesday or Wednesday evening at about 10 p.m., when there were no crowds to bother him. He’s a vegetarian, so he would get a mushroom pizza. He’d sit there and go, ‘You know what? This is the best pizza in the world.’ ”

> Mike Usinger