How to Build a Resto: Casa Italia (Episode #2): The opening of Casa Italia in Manila
CHEF DONATO MAZZOLA
Hi, everyone. I’m Donato from Casa Italia Singapore. Today we are in Manila at Fort Bonifacio. We are in our Casa Italia store. We are testing the kitchen, and we are warming up with cooking, gelato, our pizza, our breads—all our things are ready.
We are doing final testing with the food—with the service, with our coffee, and we want everything ready for the official grand opening. To make our look very, very authentic, everything, every furniture, every little piece on the display is directly from Italy; including the floor, including the lighting, including everything.
You can see all around our design, our interiors are assembled like a traditional fashion Italian house. You can see furniture that resemble the kitchen in the old times. And also in our design, all our counters. We wanted to bring this old fashion kitchen look to make our customer feel at home. That’s what Casa Italia is: it’s a home, it’s an Italian house.
Casa Italia Manila Series:
- CASA ITALIA | Ep. 1: Concept Behind an Authentically Italian Cafe in Manila! (Video)
- CASA ITALIA | Ep. 2: The First Italian House Opens in Manila (Video)
- CASA ITALIA in Manila: Coffee OTTO, Gelato & Italian Comfort Food Goodness!
For our Gelato, we always have 32 flavours on display. Some of the most famous flavours are Pistachio, which comes from Sicily, Italy; we are using chocolate from Switzerland, we are using almonds from Piemonte, from Italy. So some of our ingredients are really high-quality ingredients, and we only use high-quality ingredients for our gelato.
The rest of the menu combines homemade authentic style pizza by the slice, and we have fresh pasta, homemade lasagne, cannelloni, and spaghetti with different sauces. And we also have fresh baked goods; from our muffins, our croissants, our pastry, and we also do fresh waffles, and our homemade Italian Roast coffee.
Our training for our team here in Manila; I’ve been with the local team for several weeks, and we did great work together. We trained them to follow the exact recipes for the gelato, all our bread, and all our pizza. We’ve been particular strict with the team here because we want them to follow our recipe, and we also want them to understand the taste, so is a good way to help them understand the food and understand how to cook it.
JAY TAN
Finally, we’re here. It took us a bit of time to get here. It’s been a long, long road; over a year since we’ve inquired in Singapore for the master franchise of Casa Italia. In the past year, we’ve encountered a number of difficulties. So now everything is working perfectly fine, but it took us quite a while to get here. It’s been a long road, I’m very grateful for my staff—all the kitchen staff, service crew, all the Casa family; they really went above and beyond the call of duty to make all this all together, come together. I couldn’t have done this without them. I’m so proud of them.
Most of them are very young, but everybody really gave blood, sweat, and tears to have Casa Italia open. So it’s quite overwhelming right now; it’s a mixture of emotions. We’re tired—we haven’t slept for the past ten days; basically 2 hours a day of sleep for me especially just to make sure that this day would be successful. Thank you everyone, hope I can see everyone here at Casa Italia.
Casa Italia Manila Series: