Darlings

The Tomato Pie at Darlings is almost bare — tomato, oregano, garlic, and reggiano, with a side of Stracciatella offered to anyone who wants the richer version. That restraint is the whole point. Stripped of pepperoni and sausage, the pie leaves the crust and the wood oven with nowhere to hide, and the hard char along the rim is the first thing a New Haven-style pizza has to earn. Darlings turns out those pies from a ranch-house restaurant in Bloomfield, out in the pasture country of Prince Edward County, working off a one-page menu short enough to read as edited rather than sprawling.

The rest of that page holds the same discipline. Starters run to nduja arancini with saffron and marinara, a focaccia made fresh every day and served with a dollop of house Stracciatella, a potato frico built on a melted cheese crisp with pepperonatta and ricotta, calamari cut into strips and roasted in the wood oven with olives and caperberry, and a salumi plate of thin-cut cappicollo with Castelvetrano olives. The Famous Chopped — romaine, toasted walnut, scallion, dill, reggiano, and vinaigrette — carries enough sharpness and fat to reset a table between slices. The pasta covers Rigatoni alla Vodka, a Bucatini all'Amatriciana of guanciale and peperoncino, a Ziti al Ragu of slow-cooked pork shoulder, a Tagliatelle Carbonara, and a Gnocchi Pomodoro of fresh ricotta pasta finished in an eight-hour tomato Sugo. There is a Veal Parm as well, breaded and baked in the wood oven under brick mozzarella. Beyond the Tomato Pie, the pizzas keep to a short list: Plain Cheese, Classic Pepperoni, Italian Sausage, a creamy Vodka Pizza, and a Spicy Meatball scattered with tiny beef meatballs and pepperoncini.

Read together, the menu is a set of instructions about how the kitchen works. The dough is long-fermented; the mozzarella is stretched in house and shows up as Stracciatella across starters and pizzas alike; the focaccia is baked daily; the wood oven handles the veal and the calamari, not only the pies. None of it is plated to perform craft, and yet the craft sits right under the casual surface. Wine and local beer make up a deliberately short drinks list, in keeping with everything else. Darlings runs like a small dining room rather than a fast-turn slice counter, and it says as much out loud — online takeout can go unavailable at peak times, because the same small kitchen is busy feeding the tables already seated in front of it.

The restaurant reached its current form through a change of hands. Local reporting traces it to a 2022 change of ownership, reopened as Darlings — a western-themed pizza ranch — with one owner in the kitchen and the other working the front of house. It opened in 2023 and drew national notice quickly, landing on Air Canada enRoute's list of the country's Top Ten Best New Restaurants. Much of the seasonal produce comes from nearby County growers, Vicki's Veggies and Van Stone Farms among them, which is part of why a menu this short can afford to stay this plain.

That mix — serious cooking, a casual room, working farms in view — is what makes Darlings a dinner to plan rather than a slice to grab on the way past. Reservations run through Resy, larger parties and events through request forms, and the kitchen keeps to dinner service six nights a week, closed only on Mondays. The ranch-house and the open pasture do plenty of the introducing. The reason a table books ahead, though, is on the plate: a short menu that trusts a charred crust, a chopped salad, and an eight-hour sugo to carry the whole night.