Da Gianni & Maria Trattoria
796 St. Clair Ave. W. Toronto, Ont. 416-652-3982. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $110.
Any minute now Tony Soprano is gonna walk in the door and ask for a plate of prosciutto and olives followed by some ravioli and then a big plate of osso buco. Because Da Gianni & Maria Trattoria is a traditional Italian restaurant, not one of yer newfangled trendoid fusion places that confuses lemongrass and raw fish for Italian food.
For starters, it's on St. Clair Avenue west of Bathurst, far from the madding crowds of College Street, in a neighbourhood with about as much social cachet as the Leslie Street spit. Second, Da Gianni & Maria is pleasantly ordinary-looking, innocent of the clever modernist design that marks most of our so-called Italian restaurants. I say so-called because it's hard to find an honest Italian restaurant any more in this town.
How is it that we no longer enjoy the plethora of edible Italiana that used to be our pleasure? A decade ago, the best food in Toronto was Italian. French cooking was finished, great Chinese food had begun its flight to Markham, and Italian was the good stuff. There was an embarrasse de richesse of Italian cooking in Toronto, until they killed the goose that laid the golden egg by reinventing it as something trendy and deracinated.
The College Street restaurant boom is the worst thing that could have happened to Italian cooking. Better we should have been stuck with spaghetti and meatballs than some of the flavourless fusion crap they're selling on the strip; it's no accident that we no longer call it Little Italy, for College Street has forgotten its Italian roots.
It is thus perhaps no accident that Gianni Poggio chose to open far from College Street. Not only lower rent separates St. Clair from College; a world of expectations divides them. On St. Clair West, where trendies dare not venture, Da Gianni & Maria fits right in with its pleasant middle European looks: Some walls are brick, some mustard colour, and all are pleasantly adorned with small pen-and-ink drawings of Rome.
In the open kitchen, Gianni and his female sous chef, who looks like an Italian bubby, toil non-stop. Here, too, the restaurant distinguishes itself from College Street Italiana: Like the cooks, Da Gianni's wait staff look like ordinary people; and they're sweet. Our waitress has to don her reading glasses to look more closely at my plate one evening. That couldn't happen on College Street cause they don't hire uncool people who need reading glasses.
There's enough meat on the antipasto platter to keep Tony and his cigar-chomping buddies happy: sweet prosciutto, wonderful Italian salami, cacciatorino (lightly spicy, chewy sausage) and capicollo. Put those delights of the Italian deli together with olives, marinated mushrooms and bocconcini cheese, and we could be in a 200-year-old trattoria in Bologna. That salutary feeling is fuelled by the fresh rosemary-scented traditional soup of chicken stock with chickpeas and onions, ungreasy deep-fried calamari and shrimps, and plain-spoken seafood antipasto.
But things farinaceous are what this kitchen does best. Their gnocchi are little feather pillows, sauced Bolognese, with mushrooms or simple tomato sauce.
But for break-the-bank richness, throw dietary caution to the winds and ask for agnolotti with squash. These babies are filled in the traditional Italian manner with butternut squash purée, porcini mushrooms, ricotta cheese, Parmigiano Reggiano and eggs. But the lily does need gilding, and gild they do: The sauce is a rich cream spiked with more porcini mushrooms. Resistance is futile.
An epicure could also succumb to zuppa di pesce, credible seafood soup of big shrimp, succulent scallops, fresh clams, king crab legs and sweet juicy skate fish in strong tomato broth.
But a wise gourmand will avoid this house's risotto, which is of poor texture, its rice not quite cooked enough and its sauce not creamy.
Also to be avoided is my favourite Italian dessert, panna cotta (which literally means "cooked cream"), composed of heavy cream sweetened and cooked with just enough gelatin to cause it to hold its shape when unmoulded, but not enough to threaten the gossamer texture.
A proper panna cotta is an inhalation of angel food with enough cholesterol to kill you. I love it. This rendition looks like crème caramel and schmecks like a rubber tire.
But I can forgive almost anything when a chef has slaved to make gnocchi with the texture of clouds and the taste of dreams.
Spirit of Hospitality, a six-day Toronto festival of fine food and wine, kicks off Nov. 10 with a celebrity chef's dinner at Michael Stadtlander's Eigensinn Farm. Wednesday, Nov. 12, at the Liberty Grand, 12 chefs will create a six-course tasting menu for 400 guests. And on Nov. 13 and 14, guest chefs and wine experts will give classes and demonstrations at culinary schools around Toronto. The festival wraps up Nov. 15 with a day-long series of lectures and demonstrations at the SkyDome Renaissance hotel. Chefs include Chris Klugman, Brad Long, Joanne Yolles, Robert Clark and Andrew Blake (from Melbourne, Australia). Proceeds go to Trinity Home Hospice and the Ontario Hostelry Institute. For ticket information, call 905-277-3380.