Rizzo's House of Parm

At Rizzo's House of Parm, the breaded-and-baked plate is the organizing idea, and the kitchen builds outward from it — chicken, veal, and eggplant all arrive crusted, sauced, and run under cheese, each offered with a side of spaghetti. Parm turns up where you wouldn't expect it, too, whisked into the dip that comes with the calamari and the wings and pressed into the garlic focaccia. This is red-sauce Italian-American cooking in the Crystal Beach corner of Fort Erie, plated family-style for a table that came to share.

The parms-and-plates list is the heart of it. The chicken parm is the dish diners name first, a cutlet under tomato and bubbling cheese, with veal and eggplant versions beside it, plus a chicken piccata and a lasagna that all travel with that same side of spaghetti. The starters keep the generous register: mozzarella sticks with marinara, fried calamari with arrabbiata and a parm dip, Auntie Ang's Chicken Wings in arrabbiata with garlic parm, meatballs in pomodoro, and burrata laid over grilled focaccia. The sides run the same way — garlic-and-parm focaccia, broccolini with chimichurri, roasted rosemary potatoes. Portions run to the size that sends half the table home with a container.

The pasta carries as much personality as the parms. Penne alla vodka comes with tomato, cream, breadcrumbs, and parm, shrimp optional; Matty's Tagliatelle Bolognese is built on beef, veal, and pork; the rigatoni carbonara holds to egg yolk, guanciale, and parm. Handmade ricotta gnocchi arrives with cream and pecorino romano, and the ravioli is stuffed with ricotta and mascarpone under pomodoro. Several plates wear family names — Matty's Salad of lettuces, celery, green beans, and olives, and Trisha's Baked Shells in ricotta and tomato. Dessert stays in the same key: tiramisu, cannoli in lemon-pistachio or dark-chocolate-hazelnut, an affogato of vanilla under pulled espresso, and a warm brownie under mint-chip ice cream.

What the menu makes plain is a kitchen that takes comfort food both literally and seriously. The categories are tight and the cooking underneath the nostalgia is exacting; the familial dish names are not decoration but a tell, pointing at a table meant to read as somebody's home rather than a chef's manifesto. Parm is the thread that ties it together, the ingredient the place is named for and the one that surfaces on the wings, in the focaccia, and across the plates. Nostalgia is the register, and precision is what keeps people ordering the same few things twice.

Rizzo's is the work of Matty Matheson, the chef and television personality who grew up in Fort Erie and built the restaurant in the beach town he comes from rather than the cities where his name travels further. The name, by the family's account, is his daughter's. It opened in 2022 and drew national notice the next year as one of the country's best new restaurants — recognition that regional coverage at the time tied to the parms and the nostalgia more than the marquee. Much of the pull it now exerts on day-trippers from across southern Ontario dates from there.

The practical shape of a visit is set by demand. Walk-in seating is extremely limited and reservations are strongly recommended, so the booking is the first move; a private dining room seats up to eighteen, with shareable dinner menus starting at eighty-five dollars a head, the kind of setup a family party or a group that booked ahead settles into. Takeout runs through the website during service hours, there is no delivery, the patio opens when the weather allows, and gluten-free pasta is there for anyone who asks. For a beach town that empties and fills with the season, Rizzo's holds steady — open year-round, cooking the same parms in February that the summer crowds line up for.