Heartbreakers Pizza

Pepperoni and jalapeño go on first, then a last drizzle of honey — the Sweetheart puts heat and sweetness in the same bite, and that small, deliberate tension is the whole Heartbreakers Pizza house style in a single slice. It is a Parkdale pizza-and-wine room that treats the pie as a stated point of view and the wine list as a co-headliner rather than a courtesy. The kitchen builds familiar pizzas, then bends each one just far enough to make it its own.

That instinct for contrast runs the length of the menu. Fun Guy is the earthy counterweight to the Sweetheart, built on roasted mushroom and truffle cream with mozzarella, cremini and Le Coprin Farm mushrooms; Fennel and Sausage leans savoury and direct; Ricotta and Honey and the Lovely Cheese hold a lane for anyone who wants the crust to carry the plate. The Chicken Wings with Spice and Honey work off the same heat-and-sweet idea as the Sweetheart — spice-rubbed, then finished with honey, Calabrian chilis, jalapeño, mint and basil, hot and herby and sticky at once. A Kale Salad that can be made vegan, a Green Salad and an Antipasto give a shared table somewhere to breathe between pies, and the Chocolate Cake — dark chocolate, salted caramel, whipped ganache — is the clean finish.

Two locations give that food two different speeds. The Parkdale dining room is the table-service version, where whole pizzas and the wine list make a full night of it; the newer Winona counter trades reservations for slices and walk-up whole pies, the same kitchen in a faster register. The point of view holds across both — certified halal pepperoni offered as an add-on, dairy-free cheese on hand, a vegan route through the salads — breadth that widens who can sit down without thinning out what the kitchen does well. Which address a diner picks comes down to the night: a booked table and a bottle on Parkdale, or a slice and a whole pie off the Winona counter.

The menu is built to be split. A practical order runs Sweetheart and Fun Guy across the table, the wings in so it is not all crust and cheese, a Kale or Green Salad in the middle, and a Celebration Cake when the night has a reason for one. It travels as easily as it shares: the pies hold up in the box, and an order carried home is as much the point as a booked table. Groups get the most out of it, but it works just as cleanly for one.

The timing was almost a dare. Heartbreakers opened on Parkdale in March 2020, the same month dining rooms across Ontario went dark, and made it through its first year on takeout — the pizzas, it turned out, travelled well enough to build a following before anyone could sit down to eat them. Local reporting from the time credits the opening team of Juliana Graf, Andrew Chatham and Lizzie Chatham, and the playful streak in the name has carried through to the menu, from the Sweetheart to the Lovely Cheese. The Winona counter came afterward, once there was a base steady enough to extend.

What is left, six years on, is a neighbourhood pizza-and-wine room that reads as a fixture without leaning on the word. The wine is still half the reason — a Fun Guy and a glass is the pairing that explains why pizza and a bottle belong on the same table — and the kitchen still cooks with the heat-and-honey instinct it opened with. Parkdale gets the long version, Winona the quick one. Either way the order starts with the Sweetheart, the same pizza that has explained this kitchen since the first takeout box went out the door.