If you’ve experienced Elena, the “coffee, pizza, wine” joint in Montreal’s St-Henri neighbourhood, chances are you already know it’s a different kind of eatery. “We think restaurants should be fun—a place where people go to celebrate, feel happy and make connections,” says Ryan Gray, co-owner and sommelier at Elena. Besides offering über-delicious naturally leavened wood-fired pizzas made with freshly milled Quebec wheat, deceptively simple pasta prepared daily and a banging natural-wine list, the modern Italian hot spot, led by Gray, Janice Tiefenbach and Marley Sniatowsky, strives to nurture a healthier, more compassionate working environment with subsidized health care, shorter work weeks than most restaurants and even paid overtime.
That’s what makes Salad Pizza Wine, the debut cookbook from the Elena team, so refreshing. The book is a heartwarming—and, at times, goofy—story of community building among a group of friends dreaming of a brighter future for the often troubled food-service industry. “Salad Pizza Wine really represents the last five years. It’s fun and it’s silly, but at the end of the day, it’s fundamentally based on good things, just like the restaurant,” says Gray.
“There wasn’t a stranger involved in the process of [creating] this book,” explains writer Stephanie Mercier Voyer, who was part of Elena’s opening team in 2018. “I feel very lucky that this is my first cookbook, because I got to work on it with all my closest friends.” There are 115 playful recipes to mix and match into menus, from the restaurant’s long-standing classics, such as Kale! Caesar! and the Diavolo 2.0 pizza with pepperoncini, to a gargantuan Timpano pasta dome. “We would get on Zoom during the peak of COVID and tell stories about each recipe,” says Mercier Voyer. “It was essentially hours-long sessions with us laughing and saying the stupidest things, then reminiscing on years of friendship and the restaurant.”
Here, we’ve pulled together the perfect backyard pizza–party menu with recipes excerpted from the recently released cookbook.
