Ciao Italia

The storefront on Somerset Street West is narrow, tucked into the Chinatown blocks where most of the signage points toward other cuisines. The kitchen inside runs a full Italian dinner, and the first surprise is its reach: a menu that moves from antipasti and house pasta through veal, grilled mains, and pizza, with a seafood lane deeper than the address would lead you to expect. Ciao Italia is a compact independent, and it cooks like a place with something to prove on a block where most diners assume the good Italian cooking is happening somewhere else.

Pasta is where most tables will start. Gorgonzola Gnocchi arrives as house-made gnocchi under a Gorgonzola cream with sun-dried tomatoes; Carbonara leans on pancetta, egg yolk, and parmesan; Bolognese is a slow-cooked house meat sauce over spaghetti. The baked options run to lasagna and a ricotta-and-spinach manicotti in rosé, and there is an Alessandro pasta of meat tortellini with prosciutto cotto, peas, and mushrooms. Sauced mains hold the centre alongside them — Chicken Parmigiana built as a complete plate with spaghetti and meat sauce, and veal scallopini turned into Marsala, Piccata, or a Saltimbocca Romana wrapped in prosciutto and sage. Funghi, Arrabbiata, and a Ciao Pasta of grilled chicken, spinach, and red pepper round out the everyday orders.

The seafood is where the kitchen's specificity shows. Ciao Risotto is Arborio rice with saffron, scallops, and shrimp; Zuppa di Pesce gathers calamari, mussels, salmon, and scallops in a tomato fish stock; Shrimp Sambuca and Garlic Mussels both arrive in cream sauces with real backbone. The antipasti reach past the usual calamari to smelts fried in Calabrian chili and a Ciao Antipasti board built for two, and even the salads carry a point of view, down to the house Italian dressing on the Ciao Salad. A table can build a whole meal around fish here without ever settling for a single mixed-seafood pasta.

The pizza carries its own section, from a plain Margherita to a Quattro Stagioni quartered into ham, mushrooms, artichokes, and olives, to a Calabrese loaded with Calabrian chili paste and spicy Italian sausage. The grill adds weight at the top of the menu: an eight-ounce filet mignon in a port wine demi-glace, a twelve-ounce veal chop with peppercorn sauce. Dessert stays in the Italian register too, from tiramisu to a pistachio ricotta cheesecake. That range is deliberate — it lets a two-person pasta night and a larger group that wants different plates run off the same menu.

Ciao Italia opened in 2023 as an independent, and its owner, Wahid "Alessandro" Mirzadeh, has surfaced in local reporting on the future of the Chinatown stretch he set up on. The restaurant landed on a Somerset block better known for other kitchens, and it has kept a dinner-only schedule since — open from five most evenings, closed Tuesdays until further notice. What it offers in return is a kitchen that cooks the familiar Italian repertoire with attention rather than shortcuts: meatballs made in house, a slow-cooked meat sauce, gnocchi rolled in the kitchen. The hours read less like a limit than a choice — this is a sit-down dinner, not a midday counter.

The reservation page is the practical front door, booking tables by guest count and date and noting the Tuesday closure plainly; online ordering covers the nights when a full dinner out is more than the evening calls for. Still, the kitchen is built for the longer version of the meal — a shared antipasto board, a pizza for the centre of the table, a pasta or a veal plate, and a dessert to finish. That is the trip Ciao Italia is set up to reward, on a Somerset block where plenty of diners are already headed somewhere else.