Casa Toscana

Casa Toscana keeps a shop and a kitchen under one roof, and the shop came first. The Bottega beside the dining room stocks imported olive oil, aged balsamic, Italian wines, espresso, and pastries — the pantry of a Tuscan household, set down on Main Street in downtown Grimsby. The restaurant grew out of that trade, taking over a heritage house and turning it into a cucina where the culture that fills the shelves also lands on the plate. Casa Toscana means Tuscan house, and the heritage address makes the name close to literal.

The menu reads on two levels. A fixed list carries the dishes regulars come back for: Homemade Lasagna, layered and unhurried; Insalata di Casa Toscana; Tortellini di Melanzane e Ricotta; Milanese di Maiale; Risotto alle Vongole Veraci. Above it hangs a blackboard that turns over with the season. The June board leans filled and green — Tortellacci stuffed with taleggio and spring asparagus, finished with lemon crema and aged balsamic; Lasagna Primavera layered with sautéed spinach, Italian sausage, béchamel, mushrooms, and pecorino romano; wild boar sausage; pickerel with lemon and capers; a blood-orange salad to cut the richer plates. Starters and seconds fill in around the pasta — Carpaccio di Manzo, Branzino alla Griglia from the grill, Scaloppine Piccata. The pasta is made on-site from Altamura durum flour.

The blackboard is the tell. A kitchen that rewrites part of its menu every month, and asks you to read the wall before ordering, is cooking to the calendar rather than to a laminated standard. The house pasta laboratory is what makes that possible: shapes like Scarpinocc, Mafaldine with morels and chanterelles, and Cavatelli show up because someone is rolling and filling them in back, not because a supplier dropped them off. The Bottega closes the loop, since the oil, flour, and wine a cook reaches for are the same goods a customer can carry home.

The throughline is Luca Vitali. Casa Toscana started in 2009 not as a restaurant but as a trade in Tuscan olive oil, balsamic, and pantry goods brought to Ontario. Cooking came later, when the business took over the heritage house in 2018 and turned an importer's catalogue into a kitchen's larder. The Bottega followed in June 2022, formalizing the food-shop side that had been there from the start. Local reporting tracks the same arc — the owner, the blackboard format, the in-house pasta, the durum flour, a menu that keeps moving with what is in season.

Beyond the à la carte menu, Casa Toscana runs on set pieces. Lasagna Sundays is the standing one: a forty-five-dollar prix fixe of Insalata di Casa Toscana, Homemade Lasagna, and Signature Cake, built as an occasion rather than a weeknight plate. Big-pan event nights bring a single dish out at scale for a full table. Both formats are made to gather a table rather than feed a solo diner. Lunch midweek and dinner Tuesday through Saturday keep the doors open around those occasions, and the Bottega's espresso and pastries give the address a daytime use beyond the dinner table. Inside, the old house reads as a family dining room more than a storefront — close tables, a wine list that stays Italian, and the kind of evening that tips easily into a celebration.

Taken together, it is a place to move through, not just sit in. Read the blackboard before you order, eat what the season put on it, and browse the shelves for oil, flour, or wine on the way out. The pasta lab and the espresso counter sit a few steps apart, and Casa Toscana means for a single visit to take in both.