Rustica Pizza Vino

The oven is the argument. Rustica Pizza Vino cooks its Neapolitan pies in a wood-fuelled oven that runs near nine hundred degrees, hot enough to finish a pizza in about ninety seconds on dough built from Caputo double-zero flour. When Jenna Clarke opened Rustica in downtown Orillia, the town had no commercial wood-fired oven of its own, and the pizzeria arrived to fill that gap rather than crowd a field. The draw has since widened well past the pies: a table can split a wood-fired pizza, work through a plate of pasta, and open with something shareable, which is most of why Rustica reads equally as a date, a group dinner, or a weeknight that wants more than takeout.

On the pizza, the reference points stay classic — a Margherita of San Marzano tomato, fior di latte, and basil, available with a buffalo mozzarella or stracciatella upgrade, and a Diavola that turns up the heat with hot calabrese salami, black olives, and house chili oil. The pasta is where Rustica makes its case for being more than a pizzeria. Smocchi Gnocchi arrives in a white sauce thick with double-smoked cheddar and smoked pancetta; Spaghetti Alla Nerano leans on fried zucchini and Parmigiano; a Pennoni Neapolitan ragu simmers pork and veal for hours; and a Sorrentino seafood ragu works shrimp, calamari, octopus, and cuttlefish into paccheri. Starters carry the opening round — ricotta meatballs in Napoli sauce, arancini fried around three cheeses, calamari with a basil-pepperoncini aioli — and dessert returns to the oven with Nutella pizza donuts pulled from fried, sugared dough.