Who knew you could get delicious pizza and pasta in Chinatown in a space designed by a local award-winning firm? In the past 5 to 8 years, there have been a great variety of new restaurant options in the neighbourhood. You’ve got your local staples of Cantonese cuisine, Szeuchuan, to places pulling fresh noodles and buns and desserts. Now add taquerias, sukiyaki, bubble tea and now Italian to the mix. What do you get? A Chinatown that’s unlike any other. This week I check out Tiramisu, the newest hotspot in Chinatown slinging pizza and pasta.
Italian
What’s your favourite comfort food. Mine has to be the sandwich. It’s so versatile. Every culture and cuisine has a version of a bread-like carb vessel that holds meat and vegetables. The Chinese have baos and roujiamos, Vietnamese have banh mi, Middle-East has pitas, Venezuela, arepas, the list goes on. I grew up on sandwiches and I like to consider myself the King of Sandwiches. I can turn anything into a sandwich. Perhaps my affinity for leftovers comes from the fact that I kind of look like a sandwich myself. I have a soft and fluffy interior covered by a hard crusty shell. I’m often slathered with a slippery coating and stuffed with meat with some vegetables thrown in for decoration. Being said of how much I love sandwiches, you can imagine my excitement when I found out that Boucherie Marchigiani finally reopened.
There are certain foods that I’ve said I can eat everyday and never get tired of. One of those things is pizza. Any kind of pizza. From artisanal thin crust Neapolitan pizza to classic Montreal “all dress'” grease-wheels (I’m looking at you Pendelli’s). Sometimes I like to go back and visit some of my favourite places joints. Recently I’ve been on a pizza kick – and by recently I mean the past 30 years. To celebrate my 30-somethingth birthday, I checked out a new pizza spot in Verdun that has people talking… and I’m listening – Restaurant Rita.