Part of the series: “Exploring Edmonton’s Culinary Landscape: A Journey Through Food, Culture, and Sustainability”

Key Takeaways

Italian immigration to Alberta helped shape Edmonton’s food identity through gardens, bakeries, cafés, and community meals.
Italian culinary traditions—homemade pasta, canning tomatoes, baking, and winemaking—contributed to both the culinary heritage of Canada and early models of sustainable cooking.
Businesses like the Italian Centre Shop, Santo’s Café, and family bakeries are cultural landmarks that preserved and adapted Italian food traditions.
Intergenerational food practices—root cellars, pasta-making, and backyard grape arbors—embody both tradition and environmental care.
Today’s Italian restaurants in Edmonton balance innovation with preservation, using local ingredients while honouring ancestral techniques.

→ From Calabria to the Prairies: Italian Immigration to Alberta
→ Building a Food Culture in Edmonton’s Little Italy
→ Preserving the Harvest: Sauces, Cellars, and Seasonal Rhythms
→ Bread, Baking, and Historic Italian-Canadian Desserts
→ The Italian Centre Shop: More Than a Grocery Store
→ Contemporary Italian Cuisine in Edmonton
→ Family, Sustainability, and Cultural Resilience

From Calabria to the Prairies: Italian Immigration to Alberta

Italian immigrants arrived in Alberta in small numbers as early as the 1890s, often settling in mining towns like Coleman and Blairmore. By the 1920s and again after World War II, larger waves of immigration brought families from Calabria, Abruzzo, Sicily, and Veneto to Edmonton.

Many newcomers found work as bricklayers, masons, and tradespeople—contributing not only to Edmonton’s construction but to its neighbourhoods and kitchens. In a city with harsh winters and a short growing season, Italian families adapted their Mediterranean foodways to the prairie landscape.

They planted gardens in small backyards, preserving heirloom seeds whenever possible. They built root cellars, crafted pasta by hand, and relied on social networks to share meals and ingredients. These weren’t just survival strategies—they were cultural commitments, reinforcing identity through food.

By embedding Italian recipes and practices into Alberta’s soil, these immigrants helped shape what we now understand as traditional Canadian recipes, especially those rooted in homegrown ingredients and preserved harvests.

Building a Food Culture in Edmonton’s Little Italy

As more Italian families settled in Edmonton, the area around 95 Street and 108A Avenue—just northeast of downtown—became known as Little Italy or Viva Italia. By the 1950s, this neighbourhood had grown into a vibrant cultural and commercial centre with cafés, bakeries, social clubs, and Catholic churches.

Streets buzzed with the scent of garlic and fresh bread. Espresso machines hummed in tiny cafés like Santo’s, where men played cards and spoke Calabrian dialects. Butcher shops offered house-made sausage and veal cutlets. Community centres hosted dances, weddings, and potlucks with tables full of lasagna, meatballs, and cannoli.

Little Italy wasn’t just a district—it was a diasporic village where food was the glue. It was a place where children learned to roll gnocchi from their nonnas, and where shopping was a daily, social act.

Though demographic shifts have changed the makeup of the neighbourhood in recent decades, its food institutions endure, reminding us that Canadian food history is built on waves of immigration and the meals they brought with them.

Preserving the Harvest: Sauces, Cellars, and Seasonal Rhythms

One of the most cherished Italian food traditions in Edmonton is the annual salsa day—when families gather, often over Labour Day weekend, to turn crates of ripe tomatoes into enough sauce for the year. In back alleys and garages across the city, hand-cranked machines turn tomatoes into purees, which are then simmered, bottled, and stored in cold rooms.

This process is not only culinary—it’s communal. Multiple generations work side by side. The tomatoes may come from farms near Red Deer or home gardens in Mill Woods, but the knowledge comes from Calabria, Abruzzo, or Sicily.

Similar seasonal rituals include:

Curing olives (when imported green olives arrive in fall)
Making wine in demijohns stored in basements
Drying herbs, chili peppers, and eggplants on kitchen counters
Root cellaring potatoes, onions, and garlic for winter meals

These are practical expressions of sustainable food practices and traditional preservation methods that remain alive in Edmonton homes. In a climate with a short growing season, these rhythms create resilience, ensuring food security while preserving taste and tradition.

Bread, Baking, and Historic Italian-Canadian Desserts

Bread is sacred in Italian food culture—not just as nourishment, but as symbol. In Edmonton, families often built outdoor ovens from cinder blocks or bricks, re-creating the hearths of their home villages.

Early Italian bakeries like Bon Ton and Zoccoli’s baked rustic loaves, focaccia, and semolina bread for a growing community. Some, like Canova Bakery, also became known for sweets—almond biscotti, panettone, and jam-filled tarts.

Over time, Italian dessert culture mingled with Canadian influences. Butter tarts and date squares appeared at Italian tables, while pizzelle and crostata became common in multicultural potlucks. These exchanges form the foundation of historic Canadian desserts—not fixed recipes, but evolving traditions.

Today, Edmonton still boasts family-run Italian bakeries like D’Amore’s Mercato and Italian Bakery on 118 Avenue, where wood-fired loaves and filled cannoli stand as symbols of endurance.

The Italian Centre Shop: More Than a Grocery Store

Opened in 1959 by Frank Spinelli, the Italian Centre Shop began as a place where new immigrants could find the tastes of home—olive oil, pasta, espresso, and imported canned tomatoes. But over the decades, it became something more: a cultural cornerstone.

Walking through the shop today, now with locations in South Edmonton, Sherwood Park, and Calgary, you’ll find third-generation grandchildren shopping alongside recent newcomers. The café offers panini, biscotti, and espresso served with old-world charm and no rush.

What sets the Italian Centre apart is its role in food memory. It’s where people buy the exact olives their grandparents used, or the semolina flour that yields the perfect Easter bread. And as the shop has grown, it has also embraced Alberta’s local bounty—carrying prairie-grown beans, seasonal fruit, and regionally made cheeses.

It remains one of Edmonton’s best examples of how a food business can preserve tradition while supporting a broader, sustainable food system.

Contemporary Italian Cuisine in Edmonton

Italian food in Edmonton isn’t stuck in the past—it continues to evolve. A new generation of restaurants is blending heritage recipes with Alberta’s seasonal bounty, offering menus that are unmistakably Italian yet deeply rooted in place.

Olia, a refined Jasper Avenue restaurant, offers handmade pasta, house-cured meats, and regional Italian dishes crafted with prairie-grown ingredients. At Bar Bricco, a stylish wine and spuntini bar, small plates like soft egg yolk ravioli and whipped ricotta toast highlight simplicity and technique. Bella, nestled in Old Strathcona, adds a playful, rustic twist to familiar dishes, using local cream, wild herbs, and vegetables from Edmonton-area farms.

Across these modern kitchens, you’ll find:

Alberta beef, pork, and bison integrated into classic recipes
Housemade pasta made with regional flours and free-range eggs
Seasonal toppings like roasted squash, charred rapini, or wild mushrooms
Creative use of preserves—lemon, garlic confit, or pickled chilis—for depth of flavour

These establishments honour Italian culinary traditions not by replicating them, but by adapting them with care and attention to Edmonton’s local food system—proving that sustainable cooking in Canada can be both elegant and rooted in cultural memory.These chefs are not simply recreating what nonna made—they are extending it, often with a focus on sustainable cooking in Canada, nose-to-tail butchery, and seasonal creativity.

The result is a cuisine that honours the past without being confined by it—proving that ancestral cooking methods can coexist with modern flavour exploration.

Family, Sustainability, and Cultural Resilience

Italian foodways in Edmonton remain defined by values that resonate far beyond the table: family, seasonality, self-reliance, and hospitality. These values made survival possible during lean times and continue to inspire how food is grown, cooked, and shared today.

From root cellars in basements to backyard grapevines, Edmonton’s Italian kitchens embody a low-waste kitchen ethos: grow what you can, preserve what you grow, and share what you make.

These practices, once born of necessity, now stand as a model for eco-friendly cooking in an age of climate crisis and supply chain fragility.

As Edmonton’s culinary landscape continues to evolve, Italian food remains one of its most enduring and beloved legacies—a reminder that food isn’t just about flavour. It’s about memory, relationship, and resilience.