Anna Maria Vinci: The Taste of Sardinia in Montreal

When she was young, Anna Maria Vinci could smell the bread her mother was baking from the street corner where the Vinci children stepped off the bus. The smell guided them to the door. Inside, their mother had started at four in the morning. The Moka coffee pot was bubbling on the stove. Tablecloths were spread across the beds, ready to receive hundreds of handmade raviolis. Within these four walls of Limoilou, Sardinia was never far away.

Two Cultures in Symbiosis

Both her parents were born in Sardinia. Her father in Sorradile, a village inland, before leaving to work in the mines of Belgium, France, and then Abitibi. From there, he wrote to his sisters: he was finally ready to meet the woman of his life. When they say life has a way of working things out, it’s true. Some people are meant to meet, and life is determined to make it happen. Across from where he had grown up in Sardinia, there was a young woman. A friend of his sisters. Someone he didn’t know, but who, by all accounts, would suit him well. Arrangements were made to organize the meeting. Anna Maria’s mother crossed the Atlantic to join him — twelve days at sea, emptying her body over the railing. Nine months later, Anna Maria came into the world. Love crosses all borders!

“I’m a Limoilou girl. Vintage 1961. I don’t mind saying my age.” Anna Maria grew up between two worlds. On one side, the Quebec bungalow. On the other, a father who made his own wine, his own cheese, who slaughtered a lamb at home before Easter — not just for the family, for friends too. A massive vegetable garden planted out front, surrounded by a chicken-wire fence, because there was more space in the front yard. “When I was young, I was torn between pride in my Italian roots and the shame of not being like the other kids in the neighbourhood.” That shame, she carried it for a time. Then she let it go, like a coat that had grown too heavy. Today, Anna Maria proudly displays her Sardinian roots, but she also carries within her a deep love for Quebec.

To her, the two places share something very similar, even though they are completely different. Sardinia and Quebec share the same spirit — passionate chefs, people increasingly turning toward their local terroir, seeking to eat what grows near them, to restore dignity to what has always been there. For Anna Maria, these similarities are comforting. As if she never had to choose between her two homelands, because at heart, they want the same thing.

The Apron After the Uniform

For more than thirty years, Anna Maria was a flight attendant — then chief flight attendant — at Air Inuit, on flights dedicated to Hydro-Québec. On December 31, 2021, she hung up her wings. “I traded my flight attendant uniform for an apron.”

Said with a touch of humour, but it sums up a life turned upside down. Because in the meantime, something had taken root. Her mother, suffering from a cognitive illness, was declining. And Anna Maria felt the urgency rising. “It gave me a kick: listen, before your mother is gone, it’s time to write your recipe book.” Not a book on paper — a book of the heart, of the hands, which she began to unfold on Instagram by recreating her mother’s gestures one by one.

Her mother passed away in 2022. But she had time to see. And to say the words Anna Maria keeps like a treasure: “If someone had told me that anyone would cook like you, I never would have believed it.”

Because when she was young, Anna Maria in the kitchen — that wasn’t her thing. Her mother kept control. She was the one who mixed the ravioli filling. The children turned the crank on the pasta machine and laid the little squares on the bed — yes, on the bed, because they were hosting eighty people in a 1960s bungalow and space had to be found somewhere. And as the years passed, came the passing of the torch — and now it is Anna Maria who cooks for large gatherings.

The Siren’s Call

When asked what Sardinia means to her, Anna Maria doesn’t theorize. She feels it. “It’s like the siren’s call for sailors. You hear it all the time. When I come back from Sardinia, I have the blues. I have the blues and I have to go back.”

As a child, the island meant vacation. The beaches of Alghero, her cousins, the discotheque. Today, it’s the connection with the land she seeks. The villages where the Sardinian dialect is still spoken. The shepherds. “My favourite sound is the bells of the goats in the pastures.” A self-sufficient island that has preserved millennia-old traditions, Neolithic celebrations that became Christian. “There’s always a good reason to celebrate in Sardinia.”

And then there are the signs. After her mother’s passing, returning there, Anna Maria began to understand things she had never noticed before. The tablecloths her mother brought back from each trip, the patterns she chose — all of it pointed to ancient Sardinian symbols. “It always came back to the same pattern. I understood it late.” As if her mother had been sowing clues throughout her life, and Sardinia was finally whispering the answers. In turn, she reproduces these same gestures, these same tributes to Sardinian traditions.

Training Montreal’s Most Popular Pastaiolo

Anna Maria’s story is also the beginning of Luca’s. Her sister’s son, who grew up with his nose pressed against his grandmother’s kitchen while his mother ran a hair salon in the basement of the family home. Years later, he too left Quebec City and showed up at Anna Maria’s door in Montreal — not to cook, but to take a building inspector’s course. At the time, no one suspected that by 2025, Luca would open one of the most sought-after restaurants in the city.

During the pandemic, the aunt-nephew duo began cooking together. Watching videos by Léo Baldassare. Luca started doing pop-ups. Anna Maria helped him perfect his pasta. He leaned toward Northern Italian cuisine, she remained rooted in Sardinian — and from that connection was born something greater than the sum of its parts. “He does his thing, I do mine. We consult each other. We put our heads together when it’s needed.”

What she wanted to pass on to him goes beyond technique. “Respect for tradition. Respect for not wasting — in Sardinia, everything is recycled. Everything, everything, everything. Cooking out of passion, not obligation. And family. Your family is your first client.”

Seeing him succeed with Pasta Pooks moves her deeply. “It means that somewhere, what the family passed on to him is taking shape.” She searches for her words, then finds them: “It touches me. It moves me. It makes me proud. Name all the synonyms.” And the feeling is mutual. When you mention Anna Maria to Luca, he humbly admits: “None of this would have been possible without her.” In 2025, Pasta Pooks was named the 9th best new restaurant by Air Canada (!).

Giajà

In Sardinian, giajà means grandmother. Anna Maria: she is the matriarch, the one who nourishes, the one who keeps the memory, the one who passes it on. At Pasta Pooks, Luca calls her his “food dictionary” and his secret weapon. She’s the one he calls when a recipe won’t cooperate, the one who helps him prepare pipiriolos — those hand-extruded tubular pastas typical of Montresta, the very village where his mother was born. Luca doesn’t hide it: “Without her, none of this would be possible.”

But Giajà is also her own story. It all began in 2017, when Anna Maria and her partner signed up for the Défi Pierre Lavoie without the budget for it. So she made pasta, sold it to her colleagues. Demand exploded. “We stayed up all night making pasta.” What was supposed to be a one-time thing became a calling.

In 2023, reconnecting with the Association des Sardes du Québec, things took on a new dimension. She was asked to organize a grand Sardinian dinner — more than eighty people, eight to ten courses, orchestrated by her alone. “I had never really worked in a kitchen with chefs.” But she said yes. Because Anna Maria always says yes to new challenges.

Today, Giajà is her artisanal pasta business, and also a fresh pasta stand every Friday in summer at Beaconsfield — her baby, now in its third summer this year. It’s Sardinian cooking workshops where she shares as much culture as recipes. It’s private dinners, events at the École des métiers de la restauration du Québec, clients who find her by word of mouth all the way into Montreal’s artistic community. “People are curious. People want to taste, people want to try.”

And behind it all, there are the courses she continues to take remotely with a pastaia in Sardinia, the maestras she goes to meet in person each year. Anna Maria calls herself self-taught — but she is a self-taught woman who has never stopped learning.

Go-Go-Go!

At Pasta Pooks, the young staff call her “go-go.” You can see why. “I have to set my age aside, because otherwise I’ll tell myself there’s no point in building anything. But I don’t want to see life that way.”

What Anna Maria is building is not a business. It’s a bridge. Between Sardinia and Montreal. Between her mother’s kitchen and the one she is inventing. Between an island that calls to her and a life here that anchors her. Every time she returns from Sardinia, she brings back something that the airport scale cannot measure. “My partner won’t be able to tell me it weighs more than 23 kilos — because I carry it in my heart.” A baggage that is priceless.

Anna Maria Vinci is living proof that it is never too late to follow your dreams. That age does not define our limits. That a second life can begin even at 60, in a kitchen, hands in the flour, with no diploma other than a mother’s love that taught us how to cook. That true transmission — the kind that passes through gestures, smells, and respect for tradition — is stronger than any recipe book.

Written by Mariela Ticas-Garcia