Zenari family legacy blooms again in Little Italy
Zenari's Little Italy has opened within Zocalo as the next chapter for the Zenari family, whose roots in restaurants in Edmonton stretch back into the 1980s.
Co-owner Elisa Zenari's mother, Glenda, and father, Adriano, operated Zenari's restaurant and kitchenware store at Manulife Place in downtown Edmonton for 35 years, from 1984 to 2019. After that restaurant closed, Zenari and her husband, Ran Huget, opened and ran its evolution, Dalla Tavola Zenari, at the newly revitalized Kelly Ramsey Building on Rice Howard Way, from 2020 to the end of 2024. The couple cited the COVID-19 pandemic and diminishing downtown crowds as forcing them to close due to bankruptcy.
But less than a year later, Elisa Zenari and Huget are back with another Zenari family business. "This was not on our 2025 bingo card," Zenari told Taproot with a laugh.
The new café within Zocalo takes over from the former operation, run by Aspen Coffee Roasters. The new venture is built on the partnerships, which once saw Zenari's supply Zocalo with baked goods, Zenari said. "That was the start of our professional relationship, and that turned into a personal relationship," she said.
Between the closure of Zenari's in 2019 and the opening of Dalla in 2020, both Zenari and Huget did odd jobs for Zocalo, like delivering flowers. And the couple lives just blocks away from the shop in Little Italy. "Living in the community for 15 years, we know a lot of the customers — and a lot of them were our customers (at Zenari's and Dalla), too. It just felt like such a natural fit," Zenari said.
The new café is in a "super soft opening" phase, Zenari said, noting it serves coffee drinks and a small assortment of baked goods. Future plans are to add more baked treats, soups, sandwiches, small plates, and alcohol. Some of the future menu items will replicate dishes served at the original Zenari's, she said.
Another reason Zenari was attracted to the space is its scale. She said Dalla had 40 employees when it closed, while the new café requires two to three people to operate — so far, all of them family. "My mom, who actually started the (first) Zenari's back in the day, (and now) she's towards the end of her working career," Zenari said. "(She said to me), 'If I retire, what am I going to do? Maybe I should come bake for you.'"
Zocalo has its own phoenix story, too. The shop was devastated by a fire in January 2024 and returned partly by November 2024, with its adjoined greenhouse following in March. A blog post on its website details the extensive work required to reopen.
With the Zenari café, there will be four coffee spots between 108 Avenue and 109A Avenue on 95 Street, when Earth's Refillery Coop opens across the street from Zocalo later this month (Paper Birch Books and Spinelli's Bar Italia at The Italian Centre Shop's also serve coffee). Zenari isn't worried about competition. "When there are bunch of places that offer this similar product, then (the area) becomes a destination," she said. "It's such a nice shift from some of the issues and challenges we've had (in Little Italy) in the past."
Taproot spoke with co-owners of Zocalo and Paper Birch, as well as a founding co-op member of Earth's Refillery, who said similar things to Zenari. "We're not really concerned with competition as our coffee bar is more of a supplement to the bookstore, and we serve a different style of coffee than others in the neighbourhood," Céline Chuang, a co-owner of Paper Birch, said in an email.
