Celebrity and award-winning chef and culinarian Scott Conant is coming to Livonia for the official metro Detroit debut of Martone Street sauce, his premium Italian brand of pasta sauces.
Conant will meet and greet customers from 1 to 4 p.m. May 2 at Nino Salvaggio International Marketplace’s newest location at 18700 Haggerty Road in Livonia. He’ll be on hand to sign cookbooks and talk about the launch of Martone Street sauce, which arrived about five months ago.
At all five Nino Salvaggio stores, 24-ounce jars of the sauce are $6.99 through May 5 and then $8.99 after. It comes in four varieties.
According to martonestreet.com, the sauce line honors Conant’s roots. Its name comes from the site of the family home his grandfather built in Connecticut in 1945.
“That house became the heart of the family, filled with Sunday gatherings, simmering pots on the stove and recipes passed down from generation to generation,” according to the website.
The Martone Street brand of sauces boast restaurant quality. Southern California tomatoes are cooked down with California olive oil infused with garlic, basil and crushed red pepper. The sauces are all non-GMO and have no citric acid, no preservatives, no added sugar and no seed oils.”I pride myself on my sauce work as most chefs do,” Conant told the Free Press in a recent Zoom interview. ” And it’s in that vein that I wanted to develop those flavors.
His resume is impressive. He’s a James Beard Award-winning chef, restaurateur, cookbook author and celebrity judge on the Food Network show “Chopped.”Conant is a graduate of New York’s Culinary Institute of America in New York whose career spans four decades. His restaurants offering modern Italian fare are in the Bahamas, Georgia and New York.
The Free Press caught up with Scott Conant for a Zoom interview on Wednesday, April 22. Questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
QUESTION: You launched the sauce in late 2025. Is this the first food product that you’re making?
ANSWER: This is the first one that we’re doing ourselves. I did a licensed one years ago. We went out, raised money, identified a group of investors and started manufacturing. … It’s a real entrepreneurial effort. We developed this all the way through.
Q: What is and how important is the history behind it?
A: Martone Street is where my grandparents built a home when they came to [Connecticut} from Italy. I think my mother was 2 years old when the house was complete, and to this day, [she] still lives on Martone Street. It’s a real family story.
Q: In developing and making this sauce, did all those memories come flooding back?
A: It’s kind of the whole point of it, that they do come flooding back, but also, it’s also a conduit. Food is a conduit for connection and just being able to tell that story about what it means to me and the reason why we did it. In a way, it influences conversation and the reaction people have when I tell that story because they almost immediately come up with “Oh, I remember this. …I still live with my grandmother, or my grandmother was from this country.” It’s not even an Italian American thing. It’s a food story, and utilizing food is a connection at the table. We call those Martone Street moments. Those moments of connection, that moment where you’re like, “‘Oh, my God, this is delicious.'”
Q: There are four varieties. How will cooks use this sauce? Is this meant to be an everyday pasta sauce?
A: What we’re seeing, and the way I use it with my own family is anything you would need a tomato sauce for. Even like Sunday sauce. Instead of opening cans, tomatoes, which have citric acid in them. We crack open some jars of the Campagna marinara sauce and utilize that as if it were a canned tomato.
Q: What do you want people to know about the sauces?
A: We use fresh field tomatoes, no seed oils, no added sugars, all fresh, no preservatives or citric acid inside of it, gluten-free. We’re working on kosher certification as well. The sauces have all the clean talking points. As I always say, if you were to come to my house and I would cook for you, I wouldn’t be adding preservatives or citric acid to my food. Families love it. Moms and dads love it because it’s super healthy for kids. Kids really love it because it has that fresh inherent sweetness to it.
Q: Do you have a favorite of the four?
A: The bestseller is the signature pomodoro, which I love for different reasons. I always say that that sauce is going to get my kids through college. But my personal favorite [is] the Campagna Marinara. It’s a little more along the lines of what you would see in the Campagna region in Italy, where my grandparents are from. On the back of the jar, there’s a QR code, which takes you to various recipes meant for cooking what’s in the jar.
Q: This the first time the sauce will be available in metro Detroit. How did that come to happen?
A: We were at the Lipari Food show, and I met Leo (Salvaggio). He tasted it and said, “I got to get this on my shelves, and I want to be the first one.” That’s what we love to hear. We want people to love the sauce. This is a premium product, and we know how hard people work for the money. There’s no reason why it should be full of chemicals. And it’s done in the tradition, with the spirit of, in legacy that my grandparents would have canned tomatoes from their backyard.
Q: Do you think sauces such as this are a trend?
A: I would sa, trends aren’t long-lasting. I think this is a shift. I feel like people are really starting to look at what they’re consuming these days. And they realize that the food industry has been searching for profits instead of betterment and health.
Q: In September 2018, you were in Detroit headlining the Free Press’ Wine & Food Experience. What do you recall?
A: I remember being downtown where that event was and just being absolutely floored. Obviously, Detroit has had a reputation for years, and how much it’s kind of cleaned up, and there were so many wonderful people; everybody was hanging out. It was also a gorgeous day.
Contact Detroit Free Press food and restaurant writer Susan Selasky and send food and restaurant news and tips to: sselasky@freepress.com. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @SusanMariecooks. Subscribe to the Eat Drink Freep newsletter for insider scoops on food and dining in metro Detroit.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Celebrity chef from ‘Chopped’ to debut new pasta sauces in Livonia
Reporting by Susan Selasky, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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