“Il Canale happened because it was meant to happen”, Farruggio explains. Once the litigation with his former business partner was over, he decided to use his forty years of experience to make the concept work. “I put everything I had on the line,” he reveals, “but I knew I had forty years of experience at that moment to succeed”.
The name Il Canale came very naturally to Farruggio. “I looked around, and I said the canal is in Georgetown, is the main attraction. No other restaurant used it as a name, and I translated it into Italian. I put the concept together, and we opened up Il Canale in January 2010, officially.”
Farruggio hired a gentleman, Antonio Biglietto, to run his kitchen and it was a success ever since. “But day one was another test for me. We were ready to open at the beginning of January. I hired two managers and a chef. We trained them. We had wine, the tasting menu, and we were ready to open for family and friends, we invited 400 people. We filled up the restaurant with reservations, and then, the night before, we had a snowstorm,” Farruggio recalls.
“The same night we had the snowstorm, we had about one meter, you know, three feet of snow. So, the people I hired and trained could not come to work, so we could not open. What did we do? We started again. I never gave up. I saw Il Canale the way it was today. I saw it. I knew that with my experience and concept, I could take on anything. Just like in Karate: just step on it and go, you know? I knew it was gonna happen.“
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