Zappi’s Pizza & Pasta

In a part of Niagara Falls built for visitors in a hurry, Zappi's runs on the opposite instinct. Its gnocchi follows a recipe the family traces back four generations, the tomato sauce is made in-house and goes on every pasta, and the pizza dough still meets a stone-deck oven. The restaurant sits on Stanley Avenue, minutes from the Fallsview visitor corridor, and at a glance it looks like a convenient stop for a family that wants pizza without a production. Look closer and the Zappitelli history is all over the menu — most plainly in the stuffed banana peppers the family ties back to its older North American restaurant roots.

Start with those stuffed hot peppers, the dish that shows the kitchen's hand most plainly: two banana peppers filled with mozzarella, ricotta, and spiced pork, finished with the homemade sauce. That same red sauce runs through the ravioli, the stuffed shells, the lasagna, and the gnocchi, each topped with a layer of mozzarella. On the pizza side, the house-named Zappi's "Works" keeps an order focused — pepperoni, mushrooms, roasted red peppers, and green olives on a hearth-baked base — while the specialty pies range out to a sausage-and-rapini pizza, a Margherita, and a vegetarian Giardino built on grilled eggplant and zucchini. Subs, calzones, wings, and a garlic-bread Calabrese ring round out a list built for a table that can't agree on one thing.