Luscious Italian cheeses are the best things to emerge from Toronto’s enduring rustic Italian infatuation. From buffalo milk ricotta to burrata, the finest mozz-and-cream concoction ever invented, they turn a simple starter into an eye-closing, table-pounding affair.
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New Reviews: Ortolan, Pizza e Pazzi and Obikà
ORTOLAN Read the rest of this entry »
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1211 Bloor St. W., 647-348-4500
By now the formula is familiar: young chefs set up small, idiosyncratic restaurant in down-at-heels neighbourhood on shoestring budget and compensate for limited chalkboard menu and no-reservations policy with good food and reasonable prices. Damon Clements and Daniel Usher, the chef-owners at Bloordale Village’s new local-focused bistro, just a few doors down from the House of Lancaster strip club, happen to do a better job with the formula than many of their peers. The cooking is outstanding much of the time: superb potato gnocchi with chopped mint, early-season asparagus, creamy, melted mascarpone and grana padano cheese, for instance, or hangar steak that’s gently charred at its edges and busting with beefy flavour on top of a caper brown-butter pan sauce. Desserts are great, none better than the tiny jam pot of chocolate mousse that tastes of expensive cocoa beans. Service is spot-on. Among the quirks here: there is no vodka or gin (the owners loathe generic white spirits). Closed Sunday and Monday. Mains $14–$20.
Introducing: Obikà, Brookfield Place’s long-awaited mozzarella bar
(Image: Laura Cameron)
If Toronto’s growing number of fromageries, pizza joints and restaurant cheese caves is any indication, the residents of this city love their cheese. It’s fitting, then, that Obikà Mozzarella Bar made its Canadian debut in downtown Toronto. After meeting with strong reviews in Rome, L.A. Tokyo and New York, Obikà opened this week at Brookfield Place in the heart of the Financial District. The sushi bar–inspired concept centres on one key ingredient: mozzarella di bufala from the Campagna region of Italy.
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Obikà, the first Canadian outpost of the Italian mozzarella bar, to open downtown in May
Tasting plate of three handmade mozzarella balls
Obikà Mozzarella Bar, a new Italian restaurant opening at Brookfield Place in mid-May, is aiming squarely at a downtown lunch crowd who have grown weary of the Mövenpick Marché/Richtree Market and its attendant soap opera. Restaurateur and mozzarella enthusiast Lorenzo Sibio is behind the first Canadian location of the international chain, located in Acqua’s former home beneath Santiago Calatrava’s parabolic ceiling in the Allen Lambert Galleria.
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