Lunch is back, baby.
After something of a lengthy midday drought — at least of places in this town that hit the sweet spot of feeling convivial yet stylish, and also tête-à-tête-y — it felt good to feel the hum of an instant new classic: Occhiolino, set a bit back from the street right on Bathurst, a nose up from College West, near a graffiti-splattered wall.
As it welcomed friends and media the other day, before it properly opens next week, I was first struck by an industrial-chic setting done well — a little Scandi, a little Silver Lake, a lot Roma, all set in a spot that used to be a working garage and, decades before that, a carriage house. Neigh! Set over two succinct floors, complete with open-glass pasta-making atelier at the back (a “pasta aquarium,” I quipped) plus a long, dandy counter that’s not unlike a sushi counter (but for pasta!), it was the lure of lunch that struck me next.
“The menu is the same for lunch and dinner,” co-owner Luke Donato confirmed, giving me the one-size-fits-all spiel after my meal.
“11 to 11: the plan,” added the guy who once worked as a personal chef to Drake (perhaps you’ve heard of him?). A.m. to p.m., i.e. taking on the role of GM at this spot, his new venture is a co-production with chef Nick Manzone, who honed his craft in Italy at Piazza Duomo, declared one of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, and has for years supplied pasta to established businesses all over Toronto under his Pastificio Double Zero brand.
Alas, the joke is that most diners in this city have all had the pasta at Occhiolino without ever setting foot here, considering that Manzone is a pasta consigliere of sorts to about 20 restaurants, many of them well-known. This spot? It functions as a hub for his ongoing enterprise — “thousands of portions a week,” he estimated — while tacking on their own little restaurant.
The name? It essentially means “wink” in Italian or, to paint a more vivid picture according to one definition found online: “the act of quickly closing and opening one’s eye while leaving the other eye open is known as an occhiolino … usually performed in such a way that only the recipient notices it.”
“We are a noodle joint! That’s exactly what we are!” Donato emotionally high-fived when I threw out that term. “We really wanted that dichotomy of high-low. Providing value is a lot of fun, but we wanted it with a real room with real service with real food. Value on a price point, and approachability, as far as operating hours go.”
Dinner is one thing, after all — there have been no shortage of buzzy openings on that front in the last year — but finding a place for lunch that isn’t on the cheesy side, or on the break-the-bank side, is at best tricky. Add to that: the work-from-home trend and we’ve been a lunch-challenged society for a while. Enter: Occhiolino, which gives the makings of a place where I can easily see people doing an in-the-know business lunch, or a ladies-who-do. A daytime Hinge date (hey, who not?) or simply a take-yourself-out adventure.
My own solo adventure included an overture of bianchi di spagna ‘carbonara, a.k.a. butter beans (a humble dish dolled up with pecorino, cured yolk, etc.) and the zucca (kabocha squash with honey amertti, yum). A ring-around-the-rosie of pastas followed, including a gemelli pappardelle al barolo, a go-big-or-go-home matter of beef short rib, black trumpets and gremolata; a lumache al zafferano, with red shrimp, saffron and fennel soffritto (lumache being a pasta shape that resembles little “snails”) and — last but certainly not least — a gemelli al sugo (a deceptively simple dish, but one bursting with intense flavour: garlic, tomato, basil!).
That gemelli? The dish likely reserved for Mr. Started-from-the-Bottom Drake, Donato mentioned. “He likes things simple.”
Moving on to discuss the menu further — and the art of menu construction — he told me that the goal was to do “small dishes that complement pastas … we wanted a kind of mosaic on the menu, as opposed to a stiff coursed meal.
“Share is definitely encouraged in this restaurant,” he punctuated. Three pastas for two people: the recco.
Bring on the bucatini.
Looking content in their domain, the hirsute, mustachioed Manzone and the baby-faced, red-cheeked Donato — like a pair of chefs from a Pixar animation — they moved on to describing how their respective families fostered their love of food. The latter mentioning that his mother had gone to cooking school at George Brown, but never worked in the industry; Manzone giving an ode to his nonnas.
A core memory for him? “Canning tomatoes in the driveway every August.
“I feel very strongly about tradition and carrying on tradition,” Manzone affirmed.
One that includes, presumably, the fading ritual that is a civilized lunch.
