What’s on the menu at Arianna, a lavish Italian restaurant and lounge above Harbour 60
Including lasagna for two and sky-high pistachio gelato
Name: Arianna
Contact: 60 Harbour St., harboursixty.com/arianna, @harboursixty
Neighbourhood: Harbourfront
Owners: The Nikolaou family
Chef: Umberto Aceto
Accessibility: Fully accessible
After more than two decades of slinging steaks, the Nikolaou family—owners of Harbour 60 since its 1999 debut—used the restaurant’s recent lease renewal as a chance to expand. They took over additional floors of the historic Toronto Harbour Commission building and launched a second concept entirely: Arianna, a glam Italian restaurant with a looser, livelier spirit than its sister steakhouse.
Related: What’s on the menu at Harbour 60, the new-and-improved revamp of the luxe steakhouse
“Our guests could come here to dine at Harbour 60, come back another day to go to a private event and then come back a third time in a week to Arianna—and experience something completely different each time,” says director of operations Jeremy Geyer. “Or people can eat dinner at Harbour 60, then come up here to finish the night with a couple of drinks.”
Arianna is designed for all of the above. It’s a full-service restaurant with its own Italian menu, but it doubles as a late-night destination with DJ sets and a dolce vita energy that encourages guests to linger.
The Food
While the reimagined Harbour 60 honours its legacy of power dining, Arianna gave the team a chance to create something entirely new. “We wanted to take the dishes that Toronto diners associate with Italian cuisine and put our stamp on them,” says sous chef Umberto Aceto. “We’re working closely with suppliers to bring in the best Canadian produce that we can and simultaneously sourcing the best ingredients from around the world—and putting that all together in plates that speak to Arianna’s Italian identity.”
Related: Toronto’s top 10 new pasta dishes
The menu borrows elements from Harbour 60’s steak and dry-aged fish programs and reinterprets them through an Italian lens. Diners can expect dishes like spaghetti bolognese made with beef ground in-house, merging steakhouse traditions with Italian flavours. “We can offer all the benefits of being in a premium steakhouse and still give the classic Italian experience,” says Aceto.
The Drinks
Arianna’s cocktail program riffs on the classics with high-end spirits and a distinctly Italian sensibility. Ingredients like house-blended vermouth anchor the drinks in the restaurant’s culinary roots.
For the wine list, wine director Christian P. Hamel spotlights emerging Italian regions like Etna, Lombardy, Friuli and Sicily. The focus is on low-intervention wines from organic producers and female-led vineyards— bottles that reflect the energy and innovation driving Italy’s modern wine scene.
The Space
Like its steakhouse sibling below, Arianna is designed to impress. The room is layered with handsome stonework, detailed millwork and refined finishes that signal both permanence and polish. Along the exterior wall, circular windows are a reference to the building’s former life as the Port Authority, evoking the portholes of a ship. That motif repeats throughout the space, from the round ceiling details inlaid with crystal to the curving half-moon booths. Plush fabrics and low-slung lounge seating hint at the restaurant’s after-hours ambitions.
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Jessica Huras is a freelance writer and editor with over a decade of experience creating food, travel and lifestyle content. She’s a content editor for the LCBO’s Food & Drink magazine, and her work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Chatelaine, Toronto Life and Elle Canada, among other publications.
