Zappi’s Pizza & Pasta

In a part of Niagara Falls built for visitors in a hurry, Zappi's runs on the opposite instinct. Its gnocchi follows a recipe the family traces back four generations, the tomato sauce is made in-house and goes on every pasta, and the pizza dough still meets a stone-deck oven. The restaurant sits on Stanley Avenue, minutes from the Fallsview visitor corridor, and at a glance it looks like a convenient stop for a family that wants pizza without a production. Look closer and the Zappitelli history is all over the menu — most plainly in the stuffed banana peppers the family ties back to its older North American restaurant roots.

Start with those stuffed hot peppers, the dish that shows the kitchen's hand most plainly: two banana peppers filled with mozzarella, ricotta, and spiced pork, finished with the homemade sauce. That same red sauce runs through the ravioli, the stuffed shells, the lasagna, and the gnocchi, each topped with a layer of mozzarella. On the pizza side, the house-named Zappi's "Works" keeps an order focused — pepperoni, mushrooms, roasted red peppers, and green olives on a hearth-baked base — while the specialty pies range out to a sausage-and-rapini pizza, a Margherita, and a vegetarian Giardino built on grilled eggplant and zucchini. Subs, calzones, wings, and a garlic-bread Calabrese ring round out a list built for a table that can't agree on one thing.

The deeper the list goes, the more it rewards a mixed table. The sausage-and-rapini linguine — bitter greens, sliced sausage, garlic, and olive oil — is the pasta regulars reach for first, and the Philly steak-and-cheese sub stacks grilled rib-eye with caramelized onions and mushrooms for anyone who wandered in wanting a sandwich. Kids get a make-your-own pizza, which is less a gimmick than a way to keep a family meal moving. The dining room runs casual and bustling, busiest on weekends, with the kind of quick turnover that keeps a wait short. And because so much of the menu travels, the takeout bundles — tray pizza, wings, salad, garlic bread — do real work for a group that would rather eat at home.

What separates Zappi's from a generic district Italian kitchen is how much of that family history is load-bearing rather than decorative. The fried mozzarella traces back to Macri's, across the river in Niagara Falls, New York; the dough came down from an earlier Zappitelli; the homemade sauce even carries a vegetarian version for anyone who asks. None of it is exotic. It is the kind of specificity a kitchen accumulates when the same family has cooked the same dishes long enough to have opinions about them.

The story starts in 1971, when Tony and Connie Zappitelli began selling pizza as takeout from the garage of their home near Dunn Street and Drummond Road. The name later went quiet, then came back: the current restaurant revived Zappi's in 2002 on Stanley Avenue, in what had by then become the Fallsview tourist district. Albert Zappitelli, known as Al, runs it now, and local coverage names him as the owner carrying the family kitchen forward. The throughline is the food rather than a concept — the same recipes, moved a few kilometres across the city and a generation down the line.

That lineage is also why Zappi's works as more than a Fallsview convenience. A group can build a meal around a tray pizza and a few pastas, kids included, without anyone treating dinner as an occasion, which is the honest practical case for coming. But the part that keeps it from blurring into the strip around it is small and specific: a banana pepper stuffed with ricotta and spiced pork, a gnocchi recipe older than the current address, a red sauce that tastes the same whether a visitor or a regular ordered it.