Cavallo Nero

Ask an Ancaster regular where a mixed group can land and still keep everyone happy, and Cavallo Nero comes up often. The Italian dining room on Wilson Street works as one restaurant at lunch, when the counter turns out steak sandwiches and burgers for a quick midday table, and another at dinner, when the pasta and seafood plates take over and the pace eases. In between sits an all-week happy hour, from two to five each afternoon, that lets a diner use a polished dining room casually — a glass of wine and a plate of grilled calamari without committing to the full dinner. That breadth, more than any single dish, is what keeps the place in regular rotation.

The dinner menu is where the kitchen makes its case. Truffle Sacchetti is the richest order on it — filled pasta with green peas, wild mushroom, and pancetta in a cacio e pepe cream, finished with a honey truffle croquette. Seafood Pescatore runs the other direction, spaghetti tangled with shrimp, calamari, and mussels in a roasted red pepper cream cut with capers and basil pesto, a centrepiece that never falls back on a generic tomato sauce. The Wild Mushroom Pizza comes off the wood-fired oven under mozzarella, basil pesto, and a line of balsamic, and the Tuscan ricotta gnocchi is rolled in house. Starters lean the same way, from arancini to a three cheese dip, and a braised beef short rib gives the table a non-pasta anchor. At lunch the cooking loosens without the quality following it: a steak sandwich of grilled sirloin, sautéed mushrooms, and red onion under sundried tomato aioli on ciabatta is the midday move.

The happy hour is the other half of the menu's appeal. Every afternoon from two to five, Cavallo Nero discounts wine, beer, spritzes, and a run of food — bruschetta, mussels, grilled calamari, a Margherita pizza, the Cavallo burger, a crispy chicken Caesar wrap. Wines start around six dollars, spritzes at eleven, and the food from around twelve, which turns a polished Italian dining room into somewhere a diner can drop into on a weekday without an occasion. Lunch does similar work from the other end of the day: alongside the steak sandwich sit a chicken parm sandwich, the burger, and a half Margherita pizza with salad, the kind of order that keeps a midday visit quick.

The menu reads like a kitchen that keeps moving. The gnocchi and the sauces are made in house, and the plates shift with the season rather than sitting fixed year-round. The seafood pasta, the truffle-leaning sacchetti, and the pizzas built on pesto and balsamic instead of red sauce all point to a kitchen reaching past the Italian checklist it could coast on. Casual fine dining is the register — cooking that dresses up for dinner and still takes a walk-in at lunch.

Cavallo Nero opened in 2010 and has spent more than a decade as an Ancaster Village cornerstone. Its most recent chapter began in January 2024, when, according to local reporting, Delaney Davis and Chandler Copperthwaite took over the restaurant. No chef is named on the current menu, so the kitchen speaks through its plates rather than a name behind them. The change in ownership did not reset the place; the menu and the village role carried through.

The rest of Cavallo Nero fills in around the food. A private dining room seats groups up to sixteen, and the kitchen caters corporate lunches and family celebrations off the same list that anchors a Tuesday dinner. The patio opens when the weather turns, an easy warm-season table in Ancaster Village, and live jazz has surfaced on the calendar before. On a weekday afternoon, the same kitchen that plates truffle pasta at night is pouring a six-dollar glass of wine against an order of calamari — the two-to-five window that keeps the place busy between services.