Vaticano Italian Restaurant

The Vacca family built their name on an Italian dining room in Toronto's Yorkville, then carried it to the far southwestern edge of the province — a stretch of Niagara Boulevard in Fort Erie where the river runs toward Lake Erie and the Peace Bridge crosses into Buffalo. Vaticano's second dining room is the result: a full-service Italian restaurant that faces the water directly, with a spacious patio built for the warm months and private rooms set back for groups who want the view without the crowd. It opened here in 2020 as a companion to the Toronto original rather than a franchised copy, running the same classic Italian repertoire against a riverfront the Yorkville dining room never had. Lunch and dinner run every day of the week, from noon until late.

The kitchen holds to a traditional spine and then fills it out past the point most patio restaurants bother with. Pasta is made in house, and the list runs from Spaghetti Carbonara and Gnocchi Quattro Formaggi through a Fettuccine Aragosta built around lobster and a seafood cazzerola that carries the restaurant's own name. Antipasti cover Calamari Fritti, Arancini, Polpette, and a Caprese di Bufala; Margherita and Siciliana pizzas come off the same oven. House and family naming marks the plates the kitchen treats as its own — Filetto Vaticano, Focaccia Vaticano, Penne Cleopatra, Gamberetti Vulcano, and a Lasagne Mamma Laura that puts a name to the recipe. Gluten-free pasta is available on request, and Tiramisu closes the meal the expected way.

The breadth is the tell. Vaticano carries antipasti, homemade pasta, risotti, seafood, and veal, chicken, and lamb mains across a single menu — enough range that a table rarely has to negotiate its way to a plate everyone will eat. Pricing sits at the upper end of Fort Erie Italian, and that sets the occasion more than the appetite: the anniversary dinner, the visiting-family table, the meal planned around an evening on the water rather than a quick weeknight plate. A reservation path and the private rooms tilt the operation toward nights arranged in advance, toward groups and celebrations more than walk-in solo lunches — though the door stays open for those too, every day from noon.

The name behind it is Vacca. Felice Vacca founded the brand and cooked as its chef, and by the family's own account his son Luca now carries it forward and co-owns the operation — a father-and-son line that gives the Mamma Laura lasagna and the house-named plates a reason beyond menu decoration. The riverfront restaurant reads as the second chapter of that story rather than a separate venture: the same brand, the same classic register, moved from Yorkville to a border town two hours down the QEW. What travels is the cooking and the naming; what changes is the water outside the window.

Dinner is not the only mode. Brunch runs as its own menu, carrying the Italian kitchen into the late morning; wine and beer are poured, with the list leaning Italian; and takeout and delivery send the full menu out for tables that want the cooking without the drive to the water. The same kitchen answers all of it, from a Saturday brunch plate to a delivered tray of pasta on a weeknight.

Fort Erie carries more passing traffic than a town its size otherwise would, most of it funnelling toward the Peace Bridge and the border beyond it. A polished, family-run Italian dining room on the boulevard — one with a river patio in summer, private rooms for a crowd, and a kitchen that runs a full classic repertoire every day of the week — is a useful thing for a border town to have on hand, the answer when someone wants a real dinner near the crossing rather than a fast one. The Vaccas built it as their second act; Fort Erie treats it as a first-string option.