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Name: Enzo Pizza Bar
Neighbourhood: Queen West
Contact Info: 646 Queen St W., 416-366-0009, getenzo.com, @enzopizzabar
Owner: Ryan Menchella
The Food: Customizable personal pizzas. Diners choose a sauce (white or red) and toppings (cheese, meat and veggies). There’s also a list of nine ready-to-order ‘zas, including the classic margherita and the more exotic filomena topped with würstel.
Name: Queen Margherita Pizza
Neighbourhood: Baby Point
Contact info: 785 Annette St., 647-345-4466, queenmargheritapizza.ca, @qmpizza
Owners: John Chetti and Rocco Mazzaferro
Chefs: John Galante (chef de cuisine), Matthew Rzeszutek (head pizzaiolo) and Rocco Mazzaferro
The food: Traditional wood-fired Neapolitan pizza made with the essential Italian ingredients: Caputo Tipo 00 flour and San Marzano D.O.P. tomatoes, along with specially made Ontario fior di latte mozzarella.
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In the movies, pizza is most often portrayed as fuel for teenaged stoners, but this new supercut proves its range is quite a bit wider. Some favourites: the immortal “turbo Ginsu” scene from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1:58); an affronted restaurateur exclaiming “This is not a pizzeria!” in the Italian neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief (3:38); and Sandra Bullock dreamily ordering a pie online way back in 1995 in The Net (3:54). Warning: this video may make you go out and pick up a slice after work. [h/t Buzzfeed]
Buying a Valentine’s Day present is hard. The gift needs to not only appeal to your guy, but also match the tone of your relationship: low-key if you haven’t been dating very long (or just aren’t into grand gestures); sexy if you’re all about passion; or romantic if you can pass hours gazing into each others’ eyes. To help, we rounded up some creative Valentine’s Day gift ideas for him to fit all kinds of connections.
(Image: Igor Yu)
Name: Boccone
Neighbourhood: Mississauga
Contact info: Domestic departures, Terminal 1, Pearson Airport, 416-776-0492
Owners: Massimo Capra and SSP, a UK-based food and beverage company operating restaurants in 140 airports around the world (SSP is a competitor to OTG, which is also opening new restaurants at Pearson)
Chef: Massimo Capra, owner of Mistura and Sopra and Restaurant Makeover star. More recently, he designed the menus at Fraticelli’s in Richmond Hill and Massimo Capra’s Rainbow Room in Niagara Falls.
The food: Casual Italian favourites, with a wide enough range to appeal to airport travellers (Capra promises the dishes are held to the same standard as at his restaurants).
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2013 is shaping up to be the Year of Cheap Eats in Toronto. Lobster prices are at record lows. Delicious Asian street food is plentiful. And every fancy restaurant is tripping over itself to offer a sandwich deal. (Some bars are even serving inventive cocktails for $10 or less, a steal in the age of the $18 Manhattan). Below, 11 of the best deals in town right now.
(Image: notpeppermint from the Torontolife.com Flickr group)
Back in September, we told you that Queen Margherita Pizza was opening a new location at 785 Annette Street. Now we can tell you the opening date: February 4. Owner John Chetti also told us that construction is still underway at the Dundas and Bathurst location, which could be open as early as March. Your move, Libretto.
It’s no secret that Toronto’s Neapolitan-style pizza wars have been raging these past few months (and years). Terroni has remained conspicuously silent while Queen Margherita Pizza and Pizzeria Libretto announced multiple new locations and a raft of smaller thin-crust joints opened, but now it’s finally firing back. It’s not opening a new restaurant, however; it’s opening Il Forno del Sud, a bakery adjacent to its original Queen West location. Details are scarce (management declined to comment when we called), but The Grid recently posted the shaky 22-second video embedded above, which shows off the first run of panettone, a Milanese sweet bread. Expect Il Forno to open next spring.
In what’s amounting to a blitz of Toronto’s Neapolitan pizza scene, Queen Margherita Pizza’s John Chetti has leased a space for yet another new location west of Yonge. This one is at 772 Dundas Street West, just across the street from the recently opened Bent, bringing the total number of open or upcoming QMPs to three (the other west-end location, at Baby Point, was announced last week and is expected to open in October). The new location is only 10 to 15 minutes away from the original locations of the other big Neapolitan chains in the city, Pizzeria Libretto and Terroni, and just west of Pizzeria Via Mercanti, opened earlier this year by QMP exiles. QMP3’s oven may not even be built yet, but the pizza wars are clearly heating up. Expect the new spot to open its doors after the Baby Point location does, as soon as this fall.
(Image: notpeppermint from the Torontolife.com Flickr pool)
John Chetti, co-owner of Leslieville’s Queen Margherita Pizza, has found a west end spot without easy access to Neapolitan pies—and it’s an absence he plans to address when he opens a second QMP restaurant there in October. The new location will be at 785 Annette Street, just east of Jane, and will largely echo its sister location: a high-ceilinged vintage space—a former bank in this case—seating 100-ish people, serving up traditional Neapolitan pizza cooked in a wood-fired oven. Chetti tells us he sees parallels between Baby Point and Leslieville, both up-and-coming neighbourhoods in need of a good restaurant or two. He’s also apparently working on bringing in a chef he describes as “a huge name in the industry”—which will surely set off the next round of thin-crust wars in Toronto. After all, Pizzeria Libretto made a mirror-image west-to-east move last fall.
The Commendatore (Image: Andrew Brudz)
Eat! Drink! They are oft-heard words around an Italian dinner table, and the inspiration for the comfortable and familiar Mangia and Bevi. A King East favourite hidden inside the Ontario Design Building, the restaurant has drawn steady lunchtime crowds, obeying the exhortations of its name, for over seven years. The friendly, chatty staff serve up creative salads, sandwiches on Ace Bakery breads and some of Toronto’s best lunchtime pizza.
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(Image: Gizelle Lau)
Blink as you’re walking by, and you’ll probably miss one of Toronto’s newest pizza spots: North of Brooklyn, a tiny 12-seat restaurant tucked around the corner behind Hero Certified Burgers at Queen and Palmerston. Inspired by Brooklyn’s obsessive passion for pizza (exemplified by places like Best Pizza, South Brooklyn Pizza and Di Fara Pizza), Josh Spatz and Alex Potter (Pizzeria Libretto) wanted to bring that same high-quality, thin-crust pizza to a casual, grab-’n’-go setting—so they partnered with Best Pizza’s Frank Pinello. Torontonians have typically had to choose between whole-pie artisanal pizza and slices from the chains that have been sitting out for hours; North of Brooklyn is combining the two, with thin-crust pizzas made throughout the day (with just five on the go at any time) and sold by the slice.
(Image: Susan Keefe)
Famoso Neapolitan Pizzeria was born in the summer of 2005 after co-owner Justin Lussier visited Pizzeria Sorbillo in Naples. He contacted his friends and future business partners Jason Allard and Christian Bullock and hatched a plan to bring authentic Neapolitan pizza to Canada (granted, he wasn’t the first to have this plan). After opening a handful of locations in Western Canada, Famoso added brothers Dean and Chad Labreche to the team, and they set their sights on Ontario. The Labreche brothers are responsible for two Famoso locations in Toronto: Chad opened his location in Yorkdale Shopping Centre’s revamped food court Dine on 3 in early June. A few weeks later Dean opened his location on Bloor just west of Spadina. We dropped by the freshly minted Annex location to check it out.
After hearing that Chicago is crazy jealous of Toronto’s annual Luminato festival—and the international tourists it attracts—we got to wondering how Hogtown really stacks up against its similarly sized cousin. We looked at everything from restaurants named Acadia to notable rich guys to talk show hosts extraordinaire (and a whole bunch of other admittedly arbitrary categories). Here’s how the two cities compare in matters gustatory.
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