Excerpt from the Introduction by Stephanie Mercier Voyer
Ryan Gray is one of the first people I called when my life fell apart in 2017. We’d met a few years earlier when he hired me to work at his first restaurant, Nora Gray, and once again, I needed a job. He was about to open a new spot called Elena with partners Emma Cardarelli and Marley Sniatowsky. Chef Janice Tiefenbach, who had also worked at Nora Gray, would helm the kitchen. Ryan offered me a server position on the spot.
When Nora Gray opened in 2011, Italian food in Montreal was synonymous with checkered-tablecloth, Italian American red-sauce joints. Nora was everything but. Emma’s cooking explored regionally specific Italian dishes using fresh ingredients from Quebec, while Ryan’s wine list introduced the city’s palate to some of the most remarkable natural winemakers. Nora Gray is where I truly fell in love with food and wine. It was and remains one of the best tables in town.
Opening a more casual restaurant focused on wood-fire pizza and natural wine felt like the natural progression to what Nora Gray had started. By 2017, natural wine had carved its way onto several wine lists across Montreal, but no one in the city was making local, seasonal pizza. They wanted to change that with Elena. The wisdom at the time was that to make the best, most authentic Neapolitan pizza, you had to import everything from Italy, from the oven to the flour, tomatoes and even the water. But the thing that makes Neapolitan pizza so delicious and unique is that all the ingredients are fresh and sourced locally. Italian cuisine is all about using what can be found in your specific region. That’s why Northern Italian pasta receives a shower of Parmigiano-Reggiano, while Central Italian dishes are sprinkled with pecorino. Naturally, opening a restaurant that made Neapolitan pizza using Quebec ingredients felt more authentically Italian than making dough with imported 00 flour and bottled water from Naples.
When I showed up in Montreal, a week after my phone call with Ryan, to visit an apartment in St-Henri, a neighborhood that at the time felt eons away from the bustle of the city, I ran into Marley. He was covered in construction dust and had a big smile on his face. He asked if I wanted to come check out the building across the street. Tucked between a boarded-up apartment building and a dépanneur, this unassuming, brown-bricked storefront would soon house Elena. There was no floor, no staircase, no ceiling and no electricity. “This is where the open kitchen is going to be—openness is what this place is all about,” gestured Marley as we walked over generators and construction lamps. “Oh, and we’re building a massive wood-fire oven over there. And that’s where we’re going to set up the pizza slide.” The twinkle in his eye registered as someone who was both excited and completely insane.
That night, a bunch of our friends (people who would end up being part of Elena’s opening crew) gathered at Marley’s for dinner. All of us came of age working in the restaurant industry at a time when excess was akin to greatness. We had seen and done it all: late nights, drugs, alcohol, yelling and getting into fights. But now that we were older, we felt kind of burnt out. We were ready for a new chapter and we were hoping that new chapter could be Elena.
During dinner, dough wizard Jake “Bigsby” Bagshaw talked about the intricacies of the perfect pizza and Ryan yapped about bringing natural wine to the masses with a program that featured winemakers who shared our ethos. Elena the restaurant, he explained, was even named after one of those winemakers, the legendary Elena Pantaleoni from La Stoppa in Emilia-Romagna. She represented everything we aspired to be. Throughout her career, Elena has pushed against the grain, making decisions that were financially risky but that she knew would benefit the planet and her community in the long run. Inspired to break the mold, we all chimed in about the kind of place we wanted Elena to be. “Any idiot can open a restaurant,” laughed Marley while pointing at us. “Some people can open a great restaurant, but very few people can open a restaurant that’s also a healthy environment.”
That’s what we set out to do at Elena—to create a place where people could feel safe to express who they are, try things and become their better selves. We were aware of the risks of doing things differently and putting people’s well-being ahead of business objectives. But we knew in our guts that this was the only way we’d survive as people.
We had to burn it all down and start from scratch.
Copyright © 2023 by Stephanie Mercier Voyer, Ryan Gray, Janice Tiefenbach, Marley Sniatowsky. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
