Sugo on Surrey

The bolognese at Sugo on Surrey is built from wagyu beef and ground pork, folded into tomato sugo and bechamel and finished with grana padano and a scatter of thyme pangrattato. It is the dish to order first, because it shows the whole kitchen in one bowl: the sauce is the point, and most of the menu is a variation on how to use it. This is a Guelph Italian-influenced dining room run by Alex and Marisa Tami, and the name says as much — sugo means sauce, by local accounts from Alex Tami's family table.

A meal here tends to start generously. The antipasti run from Nonna's Meatballs — veal and pork braised in San Marzano sugo over polenta custard — to a scallop crudo dressed with charred peach vinaigrette and Calabrian chili oil, to a chef's-choice board of cheese, cured meats, house focaccia and Calabrian hot honey. Even the olives get specific: Castelvetrano and Taggiasca, marinated with fennel and preserved lemon. It is the kind of opening stretch that rewards a table willing to share before anyone commits to a main.

Past that first bowl, the pastas branch quickly — handmade ricotta gnocchi in sun-dried tomato pesto, cannelloni of ricotta and mascarpone under smoked scamorza, a seafood linguine that poaches Atlantic lobster, shrimp and PEI mussels in citrus crema. The pizzas carry their own point of view, led by the N'duja E Burrata, which stacks spicy Calabrian sausage, smoked scamorza and fresh burrata over a sugo base. And the dinner end wanders well past the Italian core, to a fourteen-ounce ribeye finished in gochujang butter, a Nagano pork chop glazed with gochujang honey, and a half chicken cacciatore braised in hunter's stew over lemon orzo. Vegetarians are not an afterthought either — the Funghi pizza, the eggplant mille-feuille and a zucchini-and-salsa-verde pie all hold their own.

The specials sheet says the quiet part out loud: this is a dining room built to be used, not saved for anniversaries. Monday pairs any salad with any pasta; Tuesday makes the obvious order explicit with pizza and a beer; Thursday turns pasta and wine into the value night with half-off bottles; Wednesday is a fixed date-night format of one bottle, an appetizer, two mains and a dessert; and Sunday goes family-style across two salads, two pastas and two desserts. A happy hour runs in the late afternoon, every day. The same instinct reaches past the dining room to Sugo Mercato, the kitchen's sister market for sauces, pasta and dough — the cooking packaged to leave the building.

The setting does work the menu doesn't have to. Sugo occupies a restored nineteenth-century limestone house on Surrey Street East — the building is roughly a century and a half old — and its exposed stone and small, separate dining rooms give a meal a sense of enclosure a storefront can't buy. The Tamis opened here in 2018, under a line the restaurant still keeps — food, harmony and laughter — and by local accounts the name traces back to Alex Tami's family. A chef from the opening years has since moved on, and the kitchen today is not organized around a single public name. More recently it added lunch — wraps, a Surrey Burger, fish tacos — and leaned further into local produce.

None of it strays far from the pot. The sauce that gave the restaurant its name still anchors the bolognese, the cannelloni and the base of every pizza, the same way it did when the Tamis opened the limestone house in 2018. A table can come for a whole branzino on a Saturday or a half-price bottle on a Thursday and walk out having tasted the same kitchen. The family-style Sunday turns the same pastas into a shared spread, two salads and two desserts wide. Sugo Mercato will even sell them the sauce to take home.