Buon Gusto Restaurant

Buon Gusto has occupied the historic Gummer building over St. George's Square since 2012, one of the fixtures of downtown Guelph's dining core. The room pairs exposed stone with an open kitchen, and a seasonal patio spills onto the square when the weather turns. Its working centre, though, is a wood-burning oven made in Reggello, Tuscany — fed with tipo 00 flour and Italian tomatoes for the fast, blistered, Neapolitan-style bake the pizza list is built on.

That list is where the oven shows its range. Boscaiola layers Italian sausage, pancetta, roasted mushrooms, caramelized onion, and balsamic glaze; Fig & Prosciutto runs sweeter with mascarpone, mission figs, and thyme; Miele Drogato finishes with chilli-infused honey and arugula; Mortadella e Pistachio leans on whipped mascarpone and pickled red onion. The Calabrese carries n'duja and cooked prosciutto under a tangle of arugula, and even the plain Margherita comes off the same tipo 00 base.

The pasta is made in house, and it carries the same specificity. Spaghetti Carbonara stays direct, built on pepper bacon, egg yolk, Grana Padano, and Pecorino. Mafalde Cinghiale Bolognese works farm-raised boar in with fennel and pepperoncino. The spring Cannelloni all'Amalfitana, the newest fixture on the menu, folds fresh egg pasta around ricotta and spinach under pomodoro and crispy basil, and the Linguine Pescatore piles shrimp, calamari, mussels, and clams into a white-wine and tomato broth. Ahead of the pasta, the antipasti do real work too: burrata filled with ricotta and mascarpone, Porcini Arancini in truffle cream, and Tina's Meatballs over creamy polenta.

What ties the menu together is how much of it starts in the kitchen rather than arriving prepped. The dough is hand-stretched, the focaccia and pasta are made fresh, the burrata is pulled in house, and the daily features follow whatever the kitchen is working through that week. Italian staples share the menu with Guelph and Ontario producers — Ontario beef on the striploin, Ontario chicken in the Chicken al Limone — so the cooking reads as Italian method applied to what is close by. Around the food sits a bar of house cocktails, an Italian-leaning wine list, and desserts like the white chocolate ricotta cheesecake, while the Pranzo Presto lunch — a sandwich or half pizza with soup or salad, daily until three — gives the same room a faster midday gear without shrinking the dinner menu.

The restaurant opened in 2012 and changed hands in 2024. The new co-owners, Ali Merchant and Khalil Khamis, kept general manager Dave Brown on and built their approach around preserving the food, the service, the room, and the team rather than remaking them, with an eye on expanding the format to other cities like Guelph. It is a particular kind of takeover — one that treats an established downtown room as something to maintain rather than reinvent. The carbonara still dates to the original kitchen, and it still reads the same way on the menu today.

Most of what defines Buon Gusto has come through the 2024 ownership change intact — the oven, the handmade pasta, the room over the square. What keeps it from sliding into nostalgia is that the menu still moves: this spring's update added the Cannelloni all'Amalfitana and reworked the Pranzo Presto sandwiches around Tina's Meatball and a chicken pesto panini. An established room that still bothers to change its lunch sandwiches is doing something a lot of long-running fixtures quietly stop doing.