Review: Queen Margherita Pizza brings flash-baked Neapolitan pies to Baby Point

Queen Margherita Pizza ★½
785 Annette St., 647-345-4466

Queen Margherita is Baby Point’s most exciting restaurant arrival in years. Posh, pizza-starved families pack the place every night, their conversation amplified by the tall windows and polished concrete floors, while a life-sized, pastel-drawn portrait of Queen Margherita of Savoy looks over the room with dignified indifference. The kitchen wisely sticks to the formula perfected by its east end counterpart: wood-fired pizza and Italian staples made with quality ingredients. Fluffy, buttery polenta is topped with spicy sausage, red pepper bolognese and fine flakes of parmegiano-reggiano. A sharp citrus vinaigrette coats a salad of crunchy fennel and supple albacore tuna. The pizza, flash-baked in a wood-fired oven, has the wondrously bubbly, chewy crust that made the Leslieville location such a hit. It supports fresh fior di latte and bright, summery San Marzano sauce in the namesake Margherita pie, and salvages the unremarkable La Scala pizza, which, despite its toppings of braised pork belly, hot peppers and salmoriglio (a garlic-blasted condiment) tastes surprisingly bland. The rich, pudding-like Nutella budino or a light blueberry panna cotta finish the meal simply and sweetly. To drink, there are decent cocktails made with fashionable Italian liqueurs—Aperol, amaro, Campari—and a short wine list, but the real treats are the three Norman Hardie wines on tap for as little as $2.50 an ounce.