Amici Restaurant

Amici's kitchen answers to two regions of Italy rather than the whole country — Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany — and lets that choice decide the menu. The clearest sign of it is a dish most Italian menus around Cambridge never attempt: Rosette di Parma all'Emiliana, pasta rolled with cooked ham and Fontina, cut into rings, baked in cream under meat sauce and Parmigiano Reggiano. The Romanini brothers built the place this way on purpose — scratch cooking, unhurried, regional by design. The framing is not decoration; it is the organizing idea behind everything that follows.

The pizza comes off dough made fresh daily from Caputo 00 flour, fired in a wood-burning oven that runs north of 750 degrees — thin, Tuscan-style, blistered at the edge. The Pizza Amici carries Alfredo, mozzarella, wood-oven-roasted chicken, home-cured bacon, chorizo, roasted red peppers, and arugula; the Pizza di Parma keeps it spare, prosciutto and parsley over olive oil and garlic. Pasta is hand-cut and the sauces are built to order. Nancy's Fettuccini folds Portobello into a Parmesan cream sauce finished with a touch of nutmeg, and the kitchen smokes its own bacon for the plates that call for it. The antipasti reward a slow start — Calamari Fritti, mussels in white wine and chili, and a Bocconcini Stuffed Meatball wrapped in pizza dough and fried to order, a twenty-minute wait built into the dish.

There is a thread of heat running through the longer menu for anyone who wants it. The Godfather stacks pepperoni, spicy sausage, and spicy meatballs over fresh garlic; the Pizza al Diavolo and Spaghetti Diavolo both carry chili, chorizo, and hot peppers behind oven-roasted chicken. Off the pizza board the range keeps widening — Penne alla Vodka, Gnocchi finished in ragu or Gorgonzola cream, a Seafood Linguini of clams, mussels, shrimp, and calamari in white wine and tomato. Even the Caesar arrives grilled, romaine charred and dressed with the house bacon and Parmigiano Reggiano. The Fungi pizza goes the other way entirely, Alfredo and bocconcini under Portobello and button mushrooms with an optional pour of truffle oil.

What ties the whole menu together is restraint about where the kitchen will and won't go. The baked pastas stay Emilian and the Secondi stay classic — Vitello alla parmigiana, Pollo Marsala, each sent out with pasta and garlic toast — and nothing on the list chases a trend it can't cook from scratch. The range is wide enough that a table rarely struggles to find its plate, yet narrow enough in technique that one kitchen can hold it together. Even dessert keeps the register: an amaretto-scented Tiramisu, and a cheesecake finished with blueberry Grand Marnier.

Amici opened in 2014, the work of brothers Mike and John Romanini, and the family runs through it more than the name does. Local reporting in Waterloo Region has credited the made-to-order sauces, the hand-cut pasta, and the home-cured bacon since the early years — the kind of detail that surfaces when a family cooks food it grew up eating rather than running a concept. The recipes go back generations on the Romanini side, and the kitchen treats them that way: the house meat sauce reaches the table as Mamma's, set over the diner's choice of pasta.

The result sits in an East Galt plaza and works like a neighbourhood dining room — dinner only, the sort of address a Cambridge household keeps for the night it wants handmade pasta without dressing up for it. Tables fill fastest on Fridays and Saturdays, and larger groups tend to call ahead. The regional labels would read as marketing somewhere else. Here they describe what the Romaninis actually cook, made to order, in a corner of Cambridge that never expected Emilia-Romagna to turn up in a plaza.