The little 32-seat room Giuseppe Lenti opened in 1971 ended up filling the whole house — four dining rooms named Capri, Sorrento, Roma and Pescara.
In 1971, Giuseppe Lenti opened a small Italian table in Pointe-Claire Village: 32 seats, not one more. His brother-in-law Sestino came to lend a hand, and the house grew the way families grow — one room at a time. Half a century later, the same Bord-du-Lac address counts four dining rooms bearing names from the old country — Capri, Sorrento, Roma, Pescara — and a terrace facing Lake Saint-Louis.
The handover happened within the family: in 1988, Maria, Sestino's wife, took the reins. Within five years the critics weighed in — Helen Rochester of The Gazette ranked the house among her twenty best tables. The directory restaurant-montreal.com, which documents this history, sums up what followed: Piazza Romana is no longer the little country restaurant of the early days, but the family keeps up the same warmth, Italian-style.
The house describes itself without pretense: a family restaurant, "A Family's Favorite Since 1971," where the ambition is to make ordinary dishes extraordinarily well. It is an honest definition of what you find here: thin crust, calamari, veal scaloppine, risottos, and a room that suits a family Tuesday night as readily as a big table. The oven has not stopped in fifty-five years; neither have the names above the dining-room doors.