Valley Restaurant

Valley gives a table three ways in. There is a two-course lunch that runs twenty-nine dollars, an early aperitivo window that pairs antipasto with a bottle of house wine for two, and a dinner menu that opens the full handmade-pasta kitchen. The Chiavarini family has run this St. Catharines dining room since 1963, and the first thing worth knowing is not when it opened but how many ways it can be used.

A meal here tends to open at the antipasti, and the kitchen treats them as more than a holding pattern. The Calamari Fritti is hand-cut in house, dusted in semolina and fried for a spicy aioli; Granchio Arancini turns crab into Italian rice balls set against a Tuscan white-bean and avocado sauce; and the Aglio e Formaggio plates a whole roasted garlic bulb with pesto-crusted goat cheese, honey and apricot mostarda for spreading across rustic crisps. The Dolce Pera Salad balances the fried plates with arugula, poached pear, roasted beet, Gorgonzola and spicy pecans. Even the bruschetta lands on focaccia the kitchen bakes itself.

The pasta is where Valley makes its name. The Lasagna is the house tradition, layered with meat and three cheeses; the Gnocchi Gorgonzola sits a step richer, pillowy potato dumplings in a Gorgonzola cream cut with pancetta and sun-dried tomatoes. From there the menu turns toward the water. Spaghetti Nero arrives as fresh squid ink pasta tangled with clams, mussels, scallops, black tiger shrimp and squid in a lemon-and-white-wine sauce with a hint of chili; Pasta di Nettuno folds the same shellfish into a creamy rosé reduction over house fettuccine; and the Ravioli All'aragosta stuffs lobster and mascarpone into pasta finished with garlic-Parmesan cream and a lobster tail. The stuffed pastas keep going — a Tuscan potato Ravioli Alla Bolognese under slow-cooked beef, pork and veal, and a meatless Ravioli Spinaci in sage tomato Gorgonzola cream scattered with crispy capers.

None of it comes from a jar. Bread, pasta, sauces and the desserts — the tiramisu, the house gelato — are made in house, and the same hands that turn out a comfort lasagna also send a black-truffle tortelloni in goat-cheese cream and a pistachio-crusted scallop over mushroom risotto. The secondi carry their own weight: a twelve-ounce bone-in veal chop in mushroom Marsala, milk-fed veal sautéed with lemon and capers, an ossobuco braised over creamy polenta, a chicken supreme stuffed with ricotta and spinach and wrapped in prosciutto, a beef cheek slow-cooked in red wine with sweet onion jam. It is a menu that refuses to choose between old-world comfort and ambition, and mostly gets away with running both.

The setting leans the same old-world direction. Valley sits on a quiet residential street in the North End, near Sunset Beach and the marina, its dining room finished in antique woodwork, stained glass and a working fireplace — the kind of address a driver would pass without a reason to stop. Six decades of Chiavarini family recipes give the cooking its backbone. That mix of intimacy and longevity has carried beyond the neighbourhood: the restaurant has been named to a national list of the country's most romantic restaurants, according to local coverage.

Which returns the question to those three ways in. The lunch is the Pranzo Italiano, one primo and one secondo for twenty-nine dollars on the days the kitchen runs a midday service; the early aperitivo pairs antipasto with a bottle of Niagara's own Konzelmann for two; and dinner opens the whole à la carte menu for a table willing to settle in on Arthur Street. The food underneath does not move much between them. The handmade pasta and the scratch sauces are the same at noon as they are at eight.