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“I bought a restaurant with no experience, thinking it was going to be cool down on Yonge Street,” Morana says. He rebranded as “Caffé Volo Ristorante,” kept the Italian menu, and took over. “I went up to the bar and started talking to people, and I was shocked: ‘What the hell am I doing here?’”

Some 28 years later, Morana is sitting near Volo’s window, looking out on a Yonge Street that’s building up and bulking out. Now 61, he has the exasperated look of someone who has seen it all and is dubious about what’s coming next–but he’s ready for it regardless.

Beer writer Stephen Beaumont, co-founder of Toronto’s beer cuisine spot Beerbistro in 2003, recalls joking with Morana about his many ambitious projects: “He’d say, ‘Oh God, it’s so difficult.’ I’d say, ‘So what are you going to do next to cause yourself incredible frustration?’”

Back in the ‘80s, Volo was hardly a beer Mecca. Allison McColeman, who started working there before Morana took over, recalls it as “a busy, prosperous restaurant, but very gangster-y. One guy that worked here used to pull the craziest scams on customers to support his heroin habit. Ralph was like a teddy bear that rolled in. He attracted a lot of other good people … and the main drug dealer probably went to jail.”

Volo’s “north downtown” stretch of Yonge Street was colourful, to say the least. Across the road was the infamous rock ‘n’ roll bar The Gasworks. Sometimes clientele spilled over. Morana remembers confronting an intimidating biker who had just gotten out of jail and was smoking up in the ladies’ washroom: “I grabbed him, and I said, ‘Grunge, if you ever f—in’ do this again, you’re never allowed in here.’ And he said, ‘Sorry, Ralph.’ From then on, the bikers were all (polite). I calmed down after that – I wasn’t going to wreck my life.”