Spago Little Italy

Spago rolls its own noodles, and the house-made pasta section is where the kitchen shows its hand. Squid-ink fettuccine arrives tangled with calamari and shrimp under a brandy blush; pappardelle carries lobster, jumbo sea scallops and more shrimp; veal ravioli sits in a slow blush meat sauce built for the plate rather than the jar. This is a full-service Italian dining room in the heart of Windsor's Erie Street Little Italy — old-world charm on the surface, a kitchen underneath it that would rather roll a noodle than open a bag. Those house-made pastas are the clearest reason to treat it as more than a neighbourhood pizza counter.

The rest of that bench keeps the momentum. A spicy vodka blush runs through rigatoni al forno and again through gnocchetti with whipped ricotta and pangrattato; a sausage-and-pepper fettuccine holds down the heartier end; and Risotto Mare Monte turns arborio rice with seared scallops and roasted wild mushrooms. Seafood is where the kitchen most likes to stretch — Linguine Di Mare gathers mussels, shrimp and scallops in a choice of tomato or white-wine sauce, and Pollo Spago goes so far as to finish a chicken breast with scallops and shrimp of its own.

The pizza runs in the same confident direction. Pizza Picante layers spicy soppressata, nduja and hot honey over tomato and fior di latte for diners chasing heat, while Pizza Bianci leans white — ricotta, chili, shaved parmigiano and garlic, no tomato at all. The opening plates are built to share: a Prosciutto Tower stacks aged prosciutto and ricotta with honey, fresh rosemary and fried gnocchi dough, and the Arancini are house-rolled Sicilian rice balls in tomato sauce with mozzarella and parmigiano — an easy first round for a table still deciding what to split.

What all of it says is that Spago wants range without losing its centre. The heat of nduja and hot honey and the reach of a squid-ink noodle sit a few lines from Fettuccine Alfredo, chicken marsala and a stracciatella soup, and the kitchen seems equally at home at both ends. A wood-fired oven and an open kitchen put some of that work in plain view, which fits a menu that can move from a shared rice ball to a lobster pappardelle without changing gear. The through-line is generosity — blush sauces, house-made pasta and baked dishes that read as comfort first and ambition second.

Spago has cooked family-recipe Italian on Erie Street since 1990, long enough to settle into the rhythm its neighbourhood keeps. The dining room opens at noon every day and runs lively and family-friendly rather than hushed, the kind of place a multi-generational table can fill without much planning. Reservations, takeout and online ordering are all on offer, wine and beer are poured alongside, and the kitchen takes on catering and private events for groups too large for an ordinary booking. Weeknights close at nine; Friday and Saturday stretch to eleven, which makes the back half of the week the natural window for a slower, later dinner.

That breadth is the whole idea. A table can keep things simple with a pizza and a shared starter, or push into squid-ink noodles, lobster pappardelle and a zuppa di pesce heavy with mussels, clams and branzino — and the bill bends to match the order. A weeknight family meal and a planned celebration can run off the same menu without either feeling out of place. Windsor's Little Italy has watched plenty of Italian kitchens open and close over the decades; Spago's answer has been to cook widely enough that almost any table finds its plate, then keep doing it a few steps along the same stretch of Erie Street.