Opening Soon: a neighbourhood restaurant on Queen West from Top Chef Canada’s Vittorio Colacitti

The Good Son is a soon-to-open restaurant at Queen and Dovercourt from Vittorio Colacitti, a Toronto chef who made the top five on Top Chef Canada this season before getting booted over an insufficiently experimental tomato salad. Colacitti sees his first solo venture, an 85-seat eatery housed in the former Nyood space at 1096 Queen Street, as the kind of neighbourhood spot where locals will be able to grab a casual midday meal, weekend brunch, or an evening cocktail. “It’ll be the type of place you can go on Friday night to grab a drink, some warm olives and grilled bread,” he says. In keeping with current trends, the menu lists an eclectic mix of shared plates, which Colacitti—who trained in Thailand and Italy between stints at Toronto restaurants like George and Didier—characterizes as “Toronto cuisine.”

Specific items on the menu include raw oysters, a signature burger and thin-crust pizzas cooked in the restaurant’s wood-fired oven, which was imported all the way from Bologna, Italy (“The Ferrari of ovens,” according to Colacitti). Price-wise, dishes top out at $28 (for a rack of side ribs), although some off-menu items may run a little higher—like a bone-in rib eye served with a whole lobster on top, or a version of the foie gras dish that won Colacitti $5,000 in a Top Chef Quickfire Challenge. The Good Son opens at the end of the month.