What’s on the menu at Pizzeria Badiali’s new Mirvish Village location

Name: Pizzeria Badiali Contact: 581 Markham St., pizzeriabadiali.com, @pizzeriabadiali
Neighbourhood: Mirvish Village
Owners: Ryan Baddeley, Nick Halligan and Owen Walker Chef: Ryan Baddeley Accessibility: Not fully accessible

Since it opened in 2021, Pizzeria Badiali has topped almost every pizza ranking in Toronto. So renowned are their slices that the shop’s original Dovercourt location still hosts some of the city’s longest lineups.

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Classic charm and quality ingredients have elevated the neighbourhood slice shop to an international sensation. So much so that, for the past two years, chef and co-owner Ryan Baddeley has been named one of the best pizza chefs in the world, beating out pizzaiolos from Brazil to Tokyo in a Milan-based global competition.

Recent high-profile collaborations have included Miss Vickie’s Vodka Sauce chips using Badiali’s cult-favourite recipe, plus three Shake Shack menu items that were available for a limited time this past April—a spicy vodka chicken parm sandwich, pizza fries and the very Toronto Brio chinotto milkshake.

Yet, despite his mounting fame, Baddeley began with humble intentions. After he helped launch two of Toronto’s most celebrated restaurants, Bar Isabel and Bar Raval, Badiali’s grew out of a pre-pandemic home-baking hobby and was only ever meant to be a side project. Inspired by lockdown hangouts with friend and fellow chef Michele Forgione (of Montreal’s Impasto and Gema Pizzeria) and fuelled by the fire of the pandemic’s takeout era, the little corner slice shop became his full-time gig.

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“The first time I made pizza was in 2019,” says Baddeley. “I was just having fun with pizza parties at my house, on the same Dovercourt block where Badiali’s is now. I’d always thought my neighbourhood could use a really cool old-school slice shop, like Bitondo’s or Fresca, but with a little higher-level execution than your usual pizzeria. That was the original vision—and it’s the same vision we have for the new Mirvish Village location.”

Fun fact: Badiali is the original Italian spelling of Baddeley’s last name, which was converted in the diaspora of his family’s Italian-via-UK heritage.

The Food

Influenced by his pizza-research travels through Italy and New York, Baddeley’s dedication to the humble slice stems from an appreciation for high-quality ingredients and a restaurant-style approach to slinging slices. “I had no experience working in a pizzeria,” he says. “I just reverse-engineered what I liked about different slices from different places.”

“Our pizza falls somewhere between a classic New York style and an Italian style that emphasizes quality ingredients. We also have a commissary prep kitchen, where each cook just focuses on one thing. One person makes the dough, another makes the sauces. When you concentrate on doing one thing really well, then everything is done really well. You get that consistency.”

Most of the original creations—including the vodka and burrata marinara—are available by the slice or by whole-pie pre-orders at the Mirvish Village location. Other staple varieties, like cheese, marinara, margherita and pepperoni, join creative recipes like cacio e pepe and capicollo-pineapple.

“Our dough recipe is more Italian than New York, so our pizza eats a bit lighter,” says Baddeley. “We use two different types of Canadian flour—a bread flour to hold in air and make the dough lighter, and a double-zero to give that stretch and chew. I like eating a lot of pizza—not just one slice—so I want something that’s light, crispy, flavourful and not too greasy.”

There’s also a whole new pizza style on the block: the grandma pie. “I wanted to do a grandma pie from the beginning, we just didn’t have the space at the Dovercourt location,” says Baddeley. “Here, we’re doing it as an upside-down margherita: cheese first, sauce on top and a bit of basil on that. If you pre-order a whole pie for takeout, you can also add pepperoni or sausage.”

The Drinks

Beverage options include nostalgic soft drinks like Brio, the Toronto spin on Italy’s bittersweet chinotto, as well as—because this location is licensed—beer, wine and cocktails. There’s Peroni ($8) and Aperol spritzes on tap ($12) and $9 glasses of pinot grigio and cabernet sauvignon. “Everything’s very affordable,” says Baddeley. “We wanted drinks to be accessible alongside our pizza slices, which start at $5.”

The Space

Previously home to the beloved Victory Café, Badiali’s new Markham Street shop joins a historic enclave of red-brick Victorians in the Mirvish Village development that’s hoping to revive the cultural corridor once anchored by Honest Ed’s. With 30 seats indoors, the new spot is triple the size of the original, and front and side patios double that capacity in warmer months.

“We had been looking for a second location to bring the quality and the speed of what we do at Dovercourt into the dream pizza shop that we wanted: a bigger space with good foot traffic that still felt like a neighbourhood pizzeria in an old building,” says Baddeley. “The Mirvish Village resurrection is an amazing place to be, and we were able to design this space from the ground up.”