Movies of War

1 of 2 2 of 2 Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday. Sign up for our free newsletter.On a busy night in Mount Pleasant, Giusti seems older than it is. The bar fills early. The room settles into a low, steady hum. Plates move out of a kitchen that, by all accounts, is smaller than anyone would prefer. There’s energy, but not frenzy. It feels composed.In a city where restaurants often open loudly, Giusti is aiming for something quieter: to become the kind of place you go back to. Not once a year. But regularly.For co-founder Carla Giusti, opening the restaurant with longtime collaborator Cameron Watt wasn’t about market timing. It was about family. After helping Watt launch Cambie Street’s June—the name is a tribute to his mother—the conversation naturally turned to Giusti’s father, Romano. Food had always been central in the Giusti household. It wasn’t reserved for special occasions. It was constant, generous, ritualistic.“I grew up in a home where no excuse was necessary to fill the kitchen table with food, family, and friends,” she tells the Straight.Naming the restaurant wasn’t complicated. Romano was briefly considered, but it didn’t quite land. Giusti, her family name, did.“I’m so proud,” she says of seeing it on the door. “It’s more than I expected.”That pride is grounded in something tangible. As chef Mark Perrier (Savio Volpe, Ask for Luigi, Pepino’s) began shaping the menu, Giusti noticed an uncanny pattern. Nearly every dish he proposed echoed something her father loved to eat.“Everything Mark wanted to put on the menu, I’d say, ‘That’s my dad’s favourite thing,’ “ she says. “Mark’s food mind is so my dad.”Giusti isn’t themed around memory; it simply cooks the way Romano ate: enthusiastically, seasonally, and without fuss. The team found its home in a heritage building on East 6th Avenue that formerly housed Bar Susu and The Whip. “Once we saw this place, we stopped looking,” says co-founder and general manager Miguel Quezada.The building came with real constraints.The kitchen couldn’t be expanded. Venting couldn’t be reconfigured without extensive heritage approvals. There’s no walk-in cooler. For a 70-plus-seat room that can turn more than once a night, it’s a tight fit.“We would love more kitchen space,” Quezada says. “But this is a heritage building. You can’t just start moving things.”Instead of fighting those limitations, they built around them. No pizza. No sprawling mains. Pasta at the centre.Early on, Quezada and Perrier asked themselves a pointed question: could they hang their hat on making some of the best pasta in Vancouver? It’s an ambitious goal, especially when you’re doing 150 covers in a night.“If you’re serving one table, you can make the best pasta in the world,” Quezada says. “When you’re doing 150, 200 covers, that’s a different challenge.”Every day, a small team rolls pasta and makes bread from morning into the afternoon. The food cost may be modest—flour and eggs rarely shock an invoice—but the labour isn’t.“It’s so many hands,” Quezada says. “Three people working all day.”Giusti’s pasta fixation traces back to when she went to culinary school in Los Angeles and years spent eating at Felix Trattoria in Venice Beach, where dough is rolled daily in a dedicated pasta lab. The Vancouver restaurant was initially imagined with something similar before practicality intervened.“That place impressed me so much,” she says. “If we even have a bit of that vibe, that’s what I’m striving for.”The pasta at Giusti leans into traditional Italian restraint. Sauces are integrated rather than ladled. The noodle carries as much weight as what clings to it. It’s not the Italian-American abundance some diners expect.“Some people want a soup with noodles in it,” Quezada says. “That’s not us.”Both Giusti and Quezada return to the same idea from different angles: this isn’t meant to be a celebration-only restaurant.“We want to be a great neighbourhood restaurant,” Quezada says. “Not a showpiece.”Mount Pleasant helps. Early on, curiosity brought diners from across the city. Now, Giusti says she’s starting to see familiar faces return, people settling into seats at the bar and establishing routines.“That’s what I want,” she says approvingly. “Regulars.”Success, for Quezada, isn’t measured in opening-week buzz, but in repeat bookings. One of the ways he tracks that is simple: how often the same names show up again and again.Three months in, the service flow doesn’t surprise him—he’s opened enough restaurants to know what to expect. What’s new is ownership: accounting, design decisions, the full financial weight of it.Giusti admits she was nervous about opening at all.“But everything Cam has ever done has kind of turned to gold,” she says, laughing. “I just trusted that.”Ask her what she hopes Giusti represents in five years, and expansion isn’t part of the picture. In fact, she rejects the notion outright.“I don’t want it to be a chain,” she says. “I want it to be this one special thing.”In a city where restaurants often burn bright and disappear, Giusti is trying to build differently: rooted in memory, shaped by constraint, defined by repetition.It’s a place you don’t need an occasion for. Just an appetite. Giusti is located at 209 East 6th Avenue. Join the discussion Facebook comments not loading? Please check your browser settings to ensure that it is not blocking Facebook from running on straight.com