After more than 60 years in business, Leo’s Ristorante in Worcester has started bottling and selling its family-secret salad dressing following years of customer demand.
“You just hear it so often that it’s like, ‘We should do something with this. This could be a great thing.’ So we are just giving it a shot,” said Gillian Turo, one of five family owners of Leo’s Ristorante.
Priced at $10 dollars for a 16-ounce bottle, the restaurant started selling its House Italian Dressing in February. The restaurant has sold nearly 1,000 bottles in the past seven months through in-house sales at the restaurant and at Stones Throw Farm in West Boylston.
This year’s launch wasn’t the first time Leo’s had ventured into selling its dressing. After developing the recipe back in the 1980s, the late Francis Turo, previous owner and son of founder Leo Turo, sold the dressing for a brief period of time to restaurant regulars, allowing them to come back and refill their bottles when they ran out. When more strict and comprehensive food-labeling requirements came into practice, the restaurant dropped the endeavor completely in an effort to protect its secret recipe.
Though packaging regulations in the United States haven’t eased back up, Turo said it was the constant requests of Leo’s customers that finally made the team decide to jump back into selling the dressing. Working and managing the restaurant’s front of house, Turo said she had a front row seat to customers’ appeals.
Even with ingredient and nutritional information now available on Leo’s dressing packaging, the Turo family’s secret recipe is still tight-lipped. Only two family members are allowed to make the dressing, the names of whom Turo said she couldn’t reveal.
One batch of Leo’s dressing takes 12 hours to make, but the two anonymous family members’ efforts haven’t gone unnoticed, as Turo said her customers’ reception of newly packaged dressing has been incredibly positive.
“It’s nice to hear people excited about getting something. A lot of customers said it for so many years ‘Oh, you should bottle this,’ and it just wasn’t something we were willing to take on at that point because we’re also trying to run a restaurant,” said Turo. “But, you know, [we’ll] just throw one more little job in there, and let’s see how far we can take it.”
Leo Turo opened Leo’s Ristorante’s first iteration, Turo’s Market, in 1910 after emigrating from Italy. Located on Shrewsbury Street, the shop sold sandwiches, meats, and home-made pastas. By 1960, the market had transitioned into Leo’s Ristorante, a sit-down Italian restaurant. In 1986, the restaurant moved its operations to a larger building around the corner on what is today 11 Leo Turo Way. In 2021, the Turo family sold the site of Leo’s and its adjacent mixed-use building for a combined $3.3 million while the restaurant remained open.
Mica Kanner-Mascolo is a staff writer at Worcester Business Journal, who primarily covers the healthcare and diversity, equity, and inclusion industries.
