Ti Amo: why we love this Joburg bakery and restaurant

When Chris and Matt Amoretti were growing up, their family were regulars at the great old Italian joints of Joburg: places like Cortina, which had migrated from the CBD to Hyde Park, and became one of those restaurants that still has hallowed status in the City of Gold’s culinary history.

These were places created by immigrants who brought their food cultures with them and, in the process, helped build Joburg’s fabric and appetite. Italian, Portuguese, Indian, Greek, Jewish, Lebanese, Chinese — the city’s best eating has always owed a great deal to families who arrived with recipes and a knack for turning strangers into regulars.

For the Amorettis, this kind of experience was just par for the course. They’d head to Cortina, the whole family gathered around a table, his father and uncles talking to the owners, another set of brothers, Paolo and Raffaele Adamo, who would sit down with them and become part of the lunch. “It was loud and it was normal,” he says. “That’s what we would do on a Sunday.”

There were other places: the special-occasion meals at La Cucina Di Ciro; the good pizza at Gino’s on Louis Botha; and, at home, there was always food too. Their mum Nicola is a cook of note, but the brothers’ Italian food link runs through their great-grandfather; their grandfather was born in Monte Carlo, with French on one side and Italian on the other. “It’s that northern edge of Italy and France where they came from,” he says. “They were all about food.”

There is even a photograph from the 1930s of their great-grandfather on board the ship coming to South Africa, wearing an apron and holding a big spoon and a pot. Chris later discovered he wasn’t actually the cook, just acting as one in a play, but frankly, the image had already done its work.

Little did Chris and Matt know that, 30 years later, they would be carrying on a version of the city and family’s food traditions themselves. And they have a little thing called the pandemic to thank for it.

Covid creation

Today Ti Amo, their bakery-restaurant-deli-neighbourhood spot, exists in two forms: in the beloved Sandhurst Shell garage shop and at Parktown North’s new Nine Yards, all blue doors, yellow walls, French café seating and big shared tables. But this mushrooming food brand didn’t begin with a hospitality group, an investor deck or a moody render of an interior. It began with Chris, who trained as an industrial designer and worked in the family timber business, making lasagne.

“I put a thing on Facebook,” he says. “Not an ad. I just wrote: does anybody want lasagnes?”

People did. It was 2020 and everyone was trapped at home and very over Zoom chats. Chris started driving around Joburg delivering the baked pasta himself, often to people he hadn’t seen in years. A drop-off that should have taken three minutes would become a 45-minute pavement catch-up through masks.

Meanwhile Matt, in lockdown with his in-laws, was perfecting sourdough. Like his older brother Chris, he’s pedantic about ingredients and how food is made, and so baking a good loaf was a serious project.

Orders started to stream in for all the goods, and eventually Chris said to Matt, “Why don’t we start this business together? You do the baking and I’ll do the food side and we’ll see how it goes.” So Ti Amo was born – with eight loaves of sourdough and 10 lasagnes – and it carried on in a fledgling capacity until the pair took on a team from a coffee shop that was closing, bought an oven and opened a space in the garage.

Garage brand

Go to Ti Amo at the Shell now, when the goods are freshly out of the oven, and you’ll queue for sourdough or bagels. The team has saved many a hungover Joburger with their breakfast paninis, and endless functions with their catering. The bakery has become the kind of place where “just popping in for a pie” generally ends with taking home extra almond croissants and pastéis de nata you absolutely did not need.

Over the festive season, while waiting for my own stash of bread, I struck up a conversation with another customer as we sampled biscotti fresh out of the oven. Chris knew our names. Actually, he knew the names of everyone else standing there too. It was, in true Joburg parlance, “a vibe”.

The garage store had established a word-of-mouth cult-like following, but as far as expansion went, the brothers had been toying with various ideas. “One thing I had strangely said was that if I was going to open another shop, it needed to be in a garden and it needed to be in an old house,” Chris explains.

Then, by chance, a customer-turned-friend mentioned that there was a new development going up in the Parks that he thought the guys should look into. Turns out, since Joburg is actually a village, the Amorettis knew the developers of Nine Yards too. They were Ti Amo customers, and their concept of a development pivoted around turning a block of old houses into a “village” of shops and restaurants surrounded by gardens. Divine intervention?

“I thought we’d do a little sandwich counter,” Chris says with a laugh. That notion soon morphed into an expanded space with a full kitchen, a harvest table of baked goods, shelves of pantry staples and an outside area for tables. With Nicola buzzing around too, it really has become a growing family business.

The Ti Amo dream team

It’s unconventional to repeatedly slot myself into a profile, but this one calls for it. Two of my standout Joburg food memories strangely converge at Ti Amo. One is coming home after a night on the jol at the age of 17 with Chris and a group of school friends, and being met with a big bowl of perfect Napolitana sauce and pasta made by “Mrs Amoretti”. It’s been stuck in my mind ever since as the benchmark for sublime, and was one of the reasons I knew the food would be good when I heard that the brothers had opened Ti Amo.

The other recollection is of a dinner organised by dynamo Vicky Ross through her brand AndTicks (by coincidence now one of Ti Amo’s neighbours too). The meal that night was made by Corvin Pietersen and his Broodkop team. To say that the young chef dazzled us with interesting, creative, unfussy food was an understatement.

Now, in what can only be described as an ambrosial turn of events, the Ti Amo crew and Pietersen have teamed up, and he’s running the Nine Yards kitchen. Chris says that they had already decided Corvin was the right person, but before Nine Yards opened, he came into the kitchen to learn the ways of Ti Amo. Chris asked him to cook three things, just so he could get a sense of where he was.

One of them was a spinach, walnut, lemon and ricotta ravioli with a simple tomato sauce. Chris took one bite and started crying. “I had this vision of us serving this level of food in a restaurant,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘Oh, I found it. This is what I want to do. I want people to experience this.’”

This is possibly the most Italian response to ravioli imaginable, and therefore entirely correct. But it also explains what Nine Yards allows Ti Amo to become. The Shell shop is the beloved daily machine, and this new space is where the food can be fun and ambitious. Corvin can be “the artist”, Chris describes him as, conjuring stracciatella, aubergine, asiago and pomelo salads, or servings of wagyu steak on fresh focaccia.

A lesson or two

Ti Amo’s great advantage may be that Chris and Matt didn’t know enough, at first, to know how restaurants are “supposed” to work.

“We don’t do things like everybody else,” Chris says. “I suppose it was ignorance.” By that he means they did not realise how much of the restaurant world can be outsourced. Sauces, dressings, bakery mixes, all the clever little components that arrive ready to be warmed, plated and passed off as house-made. There are companies that will take your recipe, make it shelf-stable and deliver it back to you in bulk. There are machines that turn frozen food into piping hot meals in minutes.

Chris is not interested. “You end up having these restaurants that are good. The service is good and the interior is beautiful and it’s a comfortable place to go and sit, but every single thing off their menu is out of a box,” he says.

At Ti Amo, that would be sacrilegious. The pastrami is made from scratch, brined for nine days and smoked in the garden, alongside the outdoor tables. The bread, bagels, mayo, sauerkraut and pickles are made in-house. Stocks come from the bones of the meat they cook.

“There’s no artistry to your meal,” Chris says of the shortcut route. “And I think that’s what we’re about. We’re about the artistry.”

For Chris, this has tipped into something almost spiritual. At some point before Nine Yards, he had the strange feeling that he needed to “build a temple”. Later, looking at the restaurant, he realised that maybe he had. Not a temple in the incense-and-chanting sense, rather a food temple.

“You’ve got this altar at the one end where all your food is and the chefs are working,” he says. “When you’re in charge of people’s wellbeing, you have to be really on point. People are buying food from you to sustain themselves and for happiness.”

This sounds esoteric, until you think about the moments and places where food has brought you comfort and joy. They do take on a reverential quality. Decades on, mine include that kitchen table at midnight, eating napolitana and fettuccine. Now, miraculously, I can get it at a sunny spot in Parktown North whenever I fancy.

After the bread, how about a burger? Read are thoughts here.

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