...with Peter Izzo

BY QUINN CURTIS AND LINDA GARSON

PHOTO BY DONG KIM

Peter Izzo’s parents immigrated from Italy to Canada in 1968 for a more fruitful life. Being entrepreneurs, they knew exactly what kind of business to start. “In the early seventies my dad opened the Napoli Sports Club, a social club for Italian immigrants to gather and celebrate. That's when coffee became prevalent in his world, being able to sell the equipment and having a product that most people didn't get,” says Izzo. “And that flourished into a cafe where people could come and have espresso and cappuccinos,” he adds. Eventually, a move to Bridgeland meant more opportunities for the Izzo family in the world of food and beverages, and they ended up opening La Dolce Vita restaurant.

One of Izzo’s fondest memories of being a kid in the restaurant industry was how much everyone supported each other. “So even though my mom and dad had a restaurant, at the end of the day, we would still close the restaurant, go to another restaurant and celebrate the night with everybody drinking wine and having dinner in the middle of the night. It was wonderful,” he says.

A couple of years after high school, Izzo felt the pressure of that supportive environment when he went to work at his father's business. “It was not something I wanted to do. The odd time I did little jobs here and there to help him out. But in the end, he said ‘okay, you need to come work with me, or I gotta shut it down, do something different, or sell it,’” says Izzo. So he and his wife joined the business, and have been running it together as a couple ever since.

Taking a small, Italian cappuccino business and turning it into the successful Cappuccino King is no easy feat. “When I came into the business with no formal education, I just knew that there were things that needed to change. We needed to operate differently. And so there was a real hard push,” Izzo says. They worked hard to keep the specific niche of their Italian cappuccino business while sculpting it into the successful, prosperous company that it is today. “And now we work with very large companies that are 10 times bigger than us. But we provide a service that they can't offer. And so that's where we celebrate who we are.”

So what bottle has Izzo been saving for special occasion? He has a bottle of 1997 Frescobaldi Brunello di Montalcino, a special bottle given to him by his first-ever clients for his support in their espresso program. But not the same bottle of 1997 Brunello gifted to him by his first clients…

The bottle signified Izzo’s first major success and meant so much to him that he and his wife decided they would hold onto it and save it for their 25th anniversary. However, one afternoon they had friends over and were celebrating, and a guest unknowingly popped open their bottle, sending Izzo into a panic. “He felt really bad and ran out to try and see if he could find that bottle again. At the time, his brother was working in the wine industry, and he had come back saying, ‘you'll never find this bottle again because it was such a great year. Most people that bought it would have either collected it or consumed it,’” says Izzo. “So my wife and I had kept the empty bottle as a memory.”

That was until Izzo’s son reached out to a sommelier colleague to see if he could track it down, and as luck would have it, he found a magnum of the same vintage at a private wine auction. “And so on our anniversary, we had gone for dinner, and before the evening was done, the owner brought out the bottle and said, this is from your son. And my son had said, ‘Happy anniversary’. And so we have today a 1.5 litre 1997 Frescobaldi Brunello di Montalchino! Now it's our 30th anniversary, and our 50th anniversary in our business, so it's a big year for us, and we’ll go ahead and open it.”