What’s on the menu at Occhiolino, a new Italian restaurant in a converted auto-body shop

Name: Occhiolino Contact: 499 Bathurst St., occhiolino.ca, @occhiolino_pastificio
Neighbourhood: Harbord Village Owners: Luke Donato and Nick Manzone Chef: Nick Manzone Accessibility: Fully accessible

Luke Donato, GM and co-owner of Occhiolino, is no stranger to Toronto’s culinary landscape. “I’ve been coming up in kitchens since I was 16. I worked at North 44 back in the ’90s, then I moved to Montreal and worked at Joe Beef, then came back to Toronto and helped Wanda Beaver run the kitchen and front of house at Wanda’s Pie in the Sky.”

Donato used to pass by the old auto-body shop that would one day become Occhiolino on his way to work, but his path to opening his own restaurant there was not so direct. After his stint at Wanda’s, he moved again, this time to New York, where he attended the French Culinary Institute (where Jacques Pépin taught him how to make an omelette) and staged with the likes of Eric Ripert, Daniel Boulud and Wylie Dufresne. “That time was an intense bootstrapping experience, and it prepared me for every aspect of my career,” says Donato.

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In 2009, Donato moved back to Toronto and joined Craig Harding’s then-new restaurant Campagnolo, where he met Nick Manzone, a young pastaio. The two eventually moved on to other things. Donato opened the much-celebrated but now-closed Bacchanal, worked for a couple of years as a personal chef for Drake and then became the corporate executive chef of Ascari. Meanwhile, Manzone began his own wholesale pasta business called Pastificio Double Zero, supplying handmade noodles to restaurants across the city. “For over a decade, we had been talking in the background of our day-to-day lives about opening a place of our own,” says Donato. “We finally felt we were ready to pull the trigger in 2022.”

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Save for a truffle shaving or two, the pasta dishes that fire out of the kitchen from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. are mostly proletariat but extremely high quality. “I’m a father now,” says Donato. “I wanted to build a restaurant of real calibre that would service our city in a democratic way, so that everyone could grab a meal with no regrets.”

The Food

Decidedly mid-falutin’ Italian plates of traditional bronze die–cut pasta that lean on Manzone’s tendency to favour expert technique over fancy ingredients. The cavatelli e fagioli, for instance—a budget meal of pasta and beans—still tastes expensive. For this dish, tiny dumplings are enveloped in lardo and met with bitter chicory, starchy cannellini beans and a flurry of pecorino. The practical ridges of the bronze die–cut pasta tubes are put to work, capturing every bit of sauce on the plate.

The Drinks

Don’t expect any bacon-washed spirits or smoked fig syrup here. Instead, there’s a range of juicy Italian natural wines that are fresh and drinkable, plus simple, well-executed and crushable cocktails like the Garibaldi, a fresh-squeezed take on the classic OJ and Campari pairing.

The Space

The skylit multi-level Scandi-style room reflects the restaurant’s minimalist mandate. “Our space is like our pasta: it’s only three ingredients,” says Donato. “Instead of egg, flour and water, there’s wood, steel and concrete.”