Giulia

Most pizzerias treat the pie as the easy part of the menu. Giulia treats it as the main event, and the Spicy Clarice is the proof — an oven-blistered pizza layered with Ontario lamb, preserved chili, house-made ricotta, and mint that no one would mistake for casual filler. The whole Elgin Street room runs on that conviction: a modern Italian kitchen built around a wood-fired oven, where the pizza has to carry a real dinner rather than fill a corner of it. Giulia opened on Elgin in 2021 under Ottawa's El Camino Group, and from the start it was set up to feel intentional rather than expansive — a short menu, focused execution, a name with a familial note, and the food kept at the centre.

The pizzas are named rather than numbered, and each stakes out a different corner of what the oven can do. Sweet Tony takes the sweet-heat side — soppressata and hot honey pulled back into balance by basil and anise seed, a pie that stays a proper tomato pizza even as it flirts with dessert. The Spicy Clarice takes the intensity. The Marcella holds the white-pie side of the list, and the Margherita stays deliberately plain, the clean classic you set beside something louder so the table never tips into overload. An Ezzo pepperoni covers the purists; a Sicilian answers anyone who wants more crust to chew.

Around the pizzas sits a full Italian arc. Burrata with grilled sourdough is the opening move, rich enough to settle a table into bread and olive oil before the oven sends anything else out. Tuna crudo and crispy calamari give the starters range, and a Caesar covers the share-plate middle. Dessert is not an afterthought here. Tiramisu and a lemon olive oil cake hold the classics, while the chocolate soft serve — finished with fruity olive oil and flaky sea salt — turns a familiar sweet into something diners plan around instead of tacking on at the end.

What ties all of it together is restraint. The pizzas come out light and structured, airy at the cornicione, carrying the char and chew that only a properly run wood oven gives — the work of patient fermentation rather than a heap of toppings. The open kitchen sets that oven at the visual centre, so the craft stays in plain view while the meal moves from crudo and burrata through the red and white pies and into dessert. The dining room reads stylish without being fussy, warm enough for a date and lively enough that the heat of the oven seems to reach the tables. The format is familiar to anyone who has eaten pizza; the precision is the part that is not.

Giulia belongs to El Camino Group, one of the busier restaurant operators in Ottawa, and the lineage shows in how it is run — built deliberately small, favouring a short menu cooked well over a long one stretched thin. There is no marquee-chef story attached, and the kitchen does not lean on one. The wood oven does the heavy lifting, shaping nearly everything that reaches the table: the blistered pies, the bread charred for the burrata, the dough that the rest of the menu is built on.

Giulia keeps to dinner hours, seven nights a week and later on weekends, with tables bookable ahead and a takeout menu for the nights you would rather eat the Sweet Tony at home. A few years into its Elgin run, it has become the kind of place Ottawa books for date nights and small celebrations — an evening where a starter, two pies, and a dessert can fill the table without anyone feeling rushed. The smart move is to leave room for the soft serve. It is the rare last course people order on purpose.