Del Piacere

At Del Piacere, the gnocchi, the pizza dough, the sauces, and the gelato come from the same pair of hands. Pietro Amoriello runs the kitchen as head chef on Preston Street, and the menu reads like a record of what one cook is willing to make from scratch rather than buy in. A Tuscan thread runs through all of it — homemade pasta turned several ways, a four-cheese gnocchi finished with Gorgonzola, fried seafood, desserts built down to the cookie inside the tiramisu. It is a broad Italian kitchen that stays personal, anchored in Ottawa's Little Italy and built to be used more than one way.

The pasta lane is where the kitchen shows its hand. Tagliolini Costa Smeralda arrives as fresh ribbons under scallops, shrimp, and clams in a white-wine saffron sauce scattered with flying fish caviar; Spaghetti Allo Scoglio keeps it plainer, with mussels, shrimp, clams, garlic, and cherry tomatoes. The Gnocchi Quatro Formaggi e Gorgonzola is the one regulars tend to name first — soft potato dumplings in an assorted four-cheese sauce that leans on the Gorgonzola for its edge. Pizza runs on fifteen-inch pies: the Genovese with pesto, bocconcini, and cherry tomatoes; the Capricciosa loaded with artichokes, mushrooms, Italian ham, and black olives; the Margherita kept honest with bocconcini, basil, and oregano. The antipasti reach for the fryer with Frittura Mista Di Pesce, squid and shrimp under garlic oil and horseradish, while Crostini Misti Con Polenta stacks fried polenta with mushrooms, bolognese, and broiled mozzarella. The lamb comes as Costoletta di Agnello in a mushroom sauce with roasted potatoes.

What ties the menu together is how little of it is outsourced. The dough is proofed in house, the pasta is rolled in house, the gelato is churned in house, and the tiramisu is homemade down to the cookie. That scratch-made habit shows up in the fine print too: gluten-free adaptations are offered across pizza, pasta, and mains, the kind of accommodation that only holds up when a kitchen controls its own components. The menu stretches wide — antipasti, pizza, seafood pasta, lamb, dessert — and stays coherent because one set of standards runs underneath all of it. The open kitchen makes that visible, with the cooking happening in front of the dining room rather than behind a wall.

Pietro Amoriello is both the head chef and, by local reporting, the owner — the arrangement where the person setting the standards also signs the lease. The Tuscan influence is his, and it gives Del Piacere a regional centre that most neighbourhood Italian menus skip in favour of a broader red-sauce default. The restaurant opened on Preston Street in 2021 and kept a seven-day week, open from late morning until eleven most nights. Lunch through late evening, its own pasta and dough stay the constant from one daypart to the next.

The breadth is the point. Weekend brunch runs Saturday and Sunday from ten to three on a menu of its own, where a Breakfast Calzone comes stuffed with eggs, bacon, grilled chicken, and mozzarella in Tuscan dough — a dish that appears nowhere on the dinner card. Midweek, the Happy Days window from Monday to Wednesday puts select bottles of wine and all draft beer at half price between three and ten. A table can treat Del Piacere as a pizza-and-gelato stop, a long handmade-pasta dinner, or a Sunday brunch, and Little Italy gives all three the same short walk. When the weather turns, a handful of patio tables open onto the Preston Street frontage. The gelato is offered in three scoops or six, which is the sort of choice a kitchen makes when it expects you to stay a while.