Il Canale, a family-owned, Italian restaurant in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood, serves some of the best pizza in the country. But it’s the service that’s earned il Canale 4.3-star rating with over 4,600 reviews on Yelp—nearly 2,000 reference its “attentive staff” and “great service.”
The restaurant has also earned many Yelp accolades, appearing on Yelp’s Top 100 Places to Eat in 2022, Top 50 Places to Eat in D.C. in 2023, and most recently, Top Pizza Spots in the U.S. in 2024, which is determined by the total volume and number of 5-star reviews written by Yelp Elites.
This kind of success doesn’t happen overnight—owner Giuseppe Farrugio, who’s known as Joe, immigrated to the United States in the 1970s and honed his pizza craft for decades before opening il Canale in 2010. Today he works alongside his son and general manager Alessandro, who prioritizes healthy workplace practices to maintain the restaurant’s stellar reputation.
Below, Alessandro shares five lessons learned from managing a 400-seat, full service restaurant, including tips for practicing work-life balance and adapting to trends.
1. Make it easy for your staff to thrive
We try to keep [our team a family]. We try to have a good atmosphere in the restaurant. The biggest challenge [with] having such a large team is having every single person follow your vision… but it’s just [about] providing the tools and the resources.
Thankfully, we have great locals and regular guests who bless our staff, being very generous with their tipping, so everybody’s able to make an income. At the end of the day, thanks to the support of our guests, all of our staff is able to go home and make a nice paycheck and support their families. [With that kind of environment], the staff is very willing to listen, learn, and execute the ideas.
2. Protect your work-life balance
For me personally, work-life balance was something I struggled with because there’s just so much to do, so much going on, that if you take a few days off, you feel that you’re going to be behind and have to work harder to catch up. But the most important advice I can give to somebody is always just find a way to make time for yourself.
You have to disconnect every couple days just to rest your brain. When you’re dealing with, at least on our scale, thousands of people a week, sometimes you need to just disconnect and use your day off to isolate a little bit, reset, recharge, let your brain recover, and then go back again.
3. Be willing to adapt to trends
We are a pizzeria at heart, but we have a lot of different offerings so basically anybody can find something they like. That’s why il Canale is so approachable: We can accommodate a very vast clientele—tourists, locals, students, officials, politicians, any type of group you can imagine.
Our philosophy has also always been to adapt to the current trends. Don’t fight it. So we find ways that we can be more accommodating to everybody. [For example,] we added gluten-free pizza and gluten-free pasta a few years ago, and it became a big success. It’s nice when you have a big table. A few guests are gluten free, a few guests are not, [some are] maybe vegetarian or vegan. Everybody looks at their menu and they find something that they like.
4. Scale up your staff proportionally
If you are increasing in sales or growing in size, don’t forget that you need to add some personnel to make up for it. You can’t just be going up and adding the same amount of people. You have to scale proportionally.
If you’re in a situation where you’re getting busy, you’re getting more customers, consider adding somebody. When each individual is working relaxed and healthier, the team as a whole works more relaxed and healthier.
5. Strive to continuously improve
We’re always so supportive of Yelp taking notice of our restaurant and with the natural amount of reviews we get. To be a family business and to consecutively be on different Top 100 Yelp lists for three years—it’s not something that we just take for granted and we let it go. We always want to keep doing better. Il Canale five, six, seven years ago is not the il Canale of today. We’re continuously evolving, continuously getting better, continuously increasing our standards.
It sets our bar higher because we know next year we need to do something even better. That’s part of our key to success, that we just don’t want to settle for what’s been given to us already. We want to continuously keep making people happy.
These lessons come from an episode of Behind the Review, Yelp & Entrepreneur Media’s weekly podcast. Listen below to hear from Alessandro, or visit the show homepage to learn about the show and find more episodes.
Photos from il Canale on Yelp
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