Cucina 360

Cucina 360 is what happens when a pizza oven is handed a whole kitchen. Remo Tortola had already built a Windsor following with Oven 360 and its Neapolitan-style pies before he opened this downtown dining room, and the restaurant reads as the fuller Italian idea those pizzas had been pointing toward all along — pasta made in-house, a seafood list, an Italian wine program, and a private room for the kind of occasion a pizzeria was never built to hold. The pizza survives, and thrives, but it now shares the table with cuttlefish-ink spaghetti and black-truffle pappardelle. The result is a place that can be a quiet weeknight dinner for two or a booked-out celebration for ninety, and rarely feels like it is straining to be either.

The pasta is where the kitchen makes its argument. Pappardelle comes with porcini, sausage, and black truffle, the menu's most concentrated run at earthy, savoury depth; a few lines down, Spaghetti al Nero di Seppia con Frutti di Mare turns the other way entirely, cuttlefish-ink strands wound through mixed seafood for a briny, coastal counterweight. Between those poles sit the Roman classics served straight — Chitarra Cacio e Pepe with Pecorino and cracked black pepper, Mezze Maniche alla Carbonara built on egg, guanciale, and Pecorino, gnocchi under a Bolognese ragù. The wood-fired pizzas keep their own counsel: the Black Truffle stacks mushrooms, sausage, and roasted peppers, while the Oven 360 holds rapini, sausage, and hot peppers as a signature carried over from the original concept. Truffle recurs like a house motif — folded into a pasta sauce, drizzled as honey over the Quattro Formaggi, tucked into the fries beneath the Finalmente burger. Dessert stays traditional, tiramisu alongside a Nutella pizza that sends the wood oven out on a sweet note.

What holds the range together is an Italian pantry the kitchen makes no effort to disguise. Olive oil, tomatoes, cheese, prosciutto, and guanciale are brought in from Italy, and that sourcing is the quiet through-line beneath a menu that otherwise travels a long way — from Roman egg-noodle pasta to Neapolitan pizza to plates Windsor rarely sees, like veal-shank polpette di ossobuco and a cool octopus salad. It is an ambitious spread for a mid-sized city, and it comes across less as a restaurant hedging its bets than as one that trusts it can cook the whole distance.

Cucina 360 opened in 2023, and Tortola has been open that it is as much a personal undertaking as a commercial one — the full-service evolution of Oven 360, and a way back into his Italian heritage. The name carries the throughline plainly: Oven 360 became Cucina 360 when the oven became a kitchen. That intention is legible in the choices, too — the imported pantry, the Roman and Neapolitan reference points held side by side, the insistence on making pasta in-house rather than buying it in. The cooking is credited to a team of Italian chefs rather than a single marquee name; no one person is put forward as the face of the kitchen.

Day to day, the restaurant runs on that doubled identity. Lunch fills the weekdays, dinner runs every night and later on the weekend, and the Italian wine list is built to be paired with a meal rather than skimmed at the bar. The private dining room seats thirty, the whole restaurant books out for as many as ninety, and catering travels off-site, which has quietly made Cucina 360 a downtown default for the occasions that need a table held weeks ahead. Vegetarians and gluten-free diners are accounted for without much ceremony, pastas among the dishes the kitchen will adjust. The throughline is still there on the plate: Cucina 360 came out of a pizza oven, and it continues to send out a rapini-and-sausage pie named for the one where the whole thing began.