Pizzeria Motola

Pizzeria Motola does not sell pizza by the slice. The pies come out of an imported stone oven whole and Neapolitan — San Marzano tomatoes, fior di latte, fresh basil, a hand-stretched crust — and they are built for a table working through a full meal, not a quick stop at a counter. The menu around them keeps drifting south toward Puglia, where chef Giuliano Motola grew up: antipasti first, a run of lunch pucce, Italian drinks, house desserts. Set on Grand Avenue South in Galt's Gaslight District, it is a chef's pizzeria that carries his own surname over the door.

The Margherita is the tell. With only San Marzano, fior di latte, basil, and olive oil on top, it leaves the crust and the oven nowhere to hide, which is the point. From there the pizze widen out: a Diavola of hot soppressata finished with a drizzle of honey; a Prosciutto, Rucola e Grana under shaved Grana Padano and aged balsamic; a Rapini e Salsiccia carrying rapini pesto, mild Italian sausage, and chilli. Lunch brings the pucce, baked half-moon pizza-bread sandwiches — Puccia Pistacchio with mortadella, burrata, and crushed pistachios; a Classico with prosciutto di Parma and burrata — served only until four. The antipasti are where the Ontario-Italy overlap shows most plainly: Burrata e Pesca pairs weekly-imported Puglian burrata with wood-fired caramelized local peaches, basil, and a Modena balsamic glaze, while Polpette della Nonna sends out three house-made meatballs in San Marzano sauce with focaccia to finish it. Even the salads come off the same oven — the Funghi tosses wood-fired oyster mushrooms with crisp breadcrumbs, Parmigiano, and garlic over arugula.

What the menu keeps saying, beneath the Neapolitan base, is Puglia. The pucce are a Salento staple; the Caffè Leccese — espresso poured over ice with sweet almond syrup — takes its name from Lecce; even the burrata is flown in weekly from the region. That thread is what separates the kitchen from a broad Italian casual menu: it is specific about where in Italy it comes from. The drinks follow the same logic, Italian end to end — Aperol and Limoncello spritzes, a Negroni aged in barrel, Peroni and Birrificio Otus on the beer list, a short wine card running from Sangiovese to a Prosecco brut. Dessert keeps it going with a Sicilian-sourced cannolo, a tiramisù, and La Dolce Pizza, a round of warm pizza dough under Nutella, pistachio spread, and icing sugar.

Motola's path to Galt is the kind that gives a pizzeria its character. He grew up in Taranto, in Puglia, watching his mother and grandmother make pasta and Neapolitan pizza by hand; according to local reporting, he left for New York at eighteen, cooked through Italian kitchens there, and eventually moved toward family in Ontario. The restaurant itself began in the lockdown years as Motola's Kitchen, a bake-at-home pizza-kit business and a run of private dinners, before he found his Gaslight District location and opened in 2024. He has described wanting a place that feels like his grandmother's kitchen back in Italy — comfort, good energy, the smell of food. The menu reads like an honest attempt at exactly that.

The operating model is part of the identity. The kitchen closes on Mondays and runs the pucce only at lunch; it keeps a few bar seats open for walk-ins while steering the colder months toward reservations, and in summer the Gaslight District patio takes the overflow. Sunday is the one day it runs straight through, lunch into dinner without a break. None of it is built for speed — it is built for the version of an Italian meal that takes an hour or two, the kind Motola grew up with: a spritz, an antipasto, a whole pie split across the table, an affogato or a caffè Leccese to close. The South of Italy he left at eighteen is what comes out of the oven on Grand Avenue South.