Massimo’s Italian Fallsview Restaurant

A Fallsview dining room can usually let the window do the cooking. Set on the Sheraton Fallsview dining level above the gorge, with the cataract filling the glass, plenty of Niagara Falls restaurants treat the meal as the thing that happens while guests watch the water. Massimo's Italian Fallsview Restaurant works the other way around. It puts a named chef and a kitchen with something to prove behind the glass, then trusts the plates to hold their own against one of the most photographed views in the country.

The menu earns that confidence in specifics. Pescatore is the fullest read of the seafood lane — shrimp, scallops, clams, mussels, and calamari in a rose sauce finished with ricotta and fried basil, a plate built around abundance rather than a single protein. The Risotto Milanese Aragoste e Gambaretto bridges the seafood and the polished-Italian sides of the kitchen at once: saffron, arborio rice, lemon oil, lobster meat, red Atlantic shrimp, and eighteen-month aged parmigiano reggiano. The steak case is an AAA Beef Tenderloin set over truffle polenta with a red wine jus, and the openers run from a three-year aged Salumi board to Truffle and Mushroom Arancini under a quattro formaggi foam and a Sous Vide Octopus with nduja emulsion and romesco.