New Dartmouth Eatery Serves Up Pasta For The People
HALIFAX — A new restaurant in downtown Dartmouth hopes to feed the city’s working-class with its unique take on take-out.
Chanoey’s Pasta is a quick-service restaurant that serves classic, chef-made pasta dishes in traditional, take-out style. Think Subway, but for fettuccine instead of footlongs.
Catherine Paulino and Carl Mangali are the husband-and-wife team that runs the restaurant. They recently took time away from their morning prep to chat with Huddle.
Wearing matching Chanoey’s Pasta t-shirts, they sat shoulder-to-shoulder at a small table. Often, one would chime in halfway through the other’s sentence to add an extra detail or give their own spin on an answer.
Mangali and Paulino have been married for two years but have been a couple since they came to Canada from the Philippines several years ago. Before coming here they were best friends in high school and later ran a small grocery business together.
They said their goal with Chanoey’s (the name is an homage to characters from their favourite TV show: Chandler and Joey of “Friends”), is to make good food at low prices “for the middle-class people and the working-class people of downtown Dartmouth.”
Mangali trained as a chef in the Philippines and spent four years working at several Halifax restaurants before Chanoey’s. Paulino had been studying marketing while working full-time as a manager at Subway.
After Covid-19 delayed their opening by two months, they were finally able to open their doors about two weeks ago. Opening a restaurant during a pandemic isn’t easy, and Mangali says it was pure luck that their take-out model has made that possible.
The inspiration for Chanoey’s, Mangali says, came from his experience working at an Italian restaurant in the city.
“When I was cooking [there] 300 people a night was normal, and on the weekend, we’d do 600 customers or 1,200 customers, I don’t know, a lot,” he says.
“But we were pumping out pastas 20 at a time in two or three minutes. It was like, this can be a takeout place. If you really learn how all the pastas are constructed and make a system out of it, you can definitely do that.”
At Chanoey’s, he and Paulino have put that philosophy into practice.
Walk in and order chicken alfredo and Mangali will whip it up, right in front of you, in just a couple of minutes.
They’ve dispensed with fancy plating, too. You’ll get your pasta in a Styrofoam takeout container and can take it to go or seat yourself at one of their diner tables.
“The concept here, the food we serve and how we display it and everything: it’s simple, it’s fast, and it’s affordable, that’s our main goal. And it’s tasty too,” Paulino says.
To keep their prices low ($11 for carbonara with a side of garlic bread, $12 for chicken alfredo), Mangali and Paulino do everything themselves: no wait staff, dishwashers, or prep cooks.
They’ve budgeted a quota for how many customers they need to serve each day, and Paulino says as long as they hit it they’re good.
“Because we’re not really in this for profit. We’re in this for passion,” she says, even if that means eating pasta every morning to make sure their daily special is good.
Mangali says it’s that passion, both for their businesses and for spending time together, that lets them work every day of the week for 14-plus hours a day.
“We work 15, 16 hours a day for another restaurant, so why not make it our own? As long as we can pay bills, and we can eat three times a day and go on vacation sometimes then we’re good,” he says.
“And we’re together,” Paulino adds. “We don’t miss something at home, or we don’t miss each other, because we’re here together.”
Paulino and Mangali say they’re excited for the people of Dartmouth to try their food. Already, Mangali has some ideas for creative new daily pasta specials.
A few of the “extreme experiments” he’s toying with bring Asian flavours into traditional pasta dishes, and he said he’s particularly excited to try a coconut curry spaghetti.
“It’s going to be weird,” he says.
Paulino’s pitch to hungry locals is a little more straightforward.
“If you cook it yourself it’s going to be the same cost, and then you have to wash everything. Why not just come down here and have some tasty pasta, instead?”