Retro Gusto

Retro Gusto sells pizza, but it does not behave like a pizzeria. There is no counter to order from and no slice to grab on the way past. The doors open at five, the tables take reservations, and the Roman-style tonda pies arrive as the centre of a sit-down Italian dinner rather than the whole of a quick one. The kitchen works a compact dining room on Preston Street, in the heart of Ottawa's Little Italy, and it treats its pizza the way a trattoria treats its pasta — the thing a table builds a meal around, not the thing it settles for on the way home.

The tonda lineup is where the menu makes its argument. Salamino carries the heat and the cured pork: sopressata calabrese, smoked caciocavallo, and a farinella hot honey that pulls the whole pie sweet and sharp at once. Funghi runs the other direction — a white pie layered with fontina DOP and a stack of named mushrooms, Le Coprin and maitake and shimeji and cremini, finished with grana padano and chives. Around those two sit the quieter classics: a Margherita con Bufala built on buffalo mozzarella, the tomato-and-pecorino Cosacca, a spinach-feta-and-kalamata Greca. Most of the board is vegetarian-friendly by design, and the surest way to read the kitchen is to split one red pie and one white and let the contrast do the explaining.

What keeps the first half of the meal from reading as a pizza prelude is the depth before the oven. Retro Suppli — saffron risotto croquettes filled with fontina DOP — anchor the fritti, alongside fried lamb skewers with salsa verde mayo and espelette. The antipasti run richer and stranger than a neighbourhood Italian kitchen needs to: mortadella under grated grana padano and spicy truffle honey, imported burrata set against anchovy and house-cured cherry tomato, raw Canadian beef carpaccio with capers, arugula, and dijonaise. Threaded through all of it is the house farinella — a bianca base that reappears again and again across the menu, torn alongside the antipasti, folded into the hot honey, and shaped at the end into the shell of a pistachio-and-dark-chocolate cannoli. For a table that wants a fork instead of a wedge, there is lasagna baked to order under a grana padano fonduta. It is a menu with more corners than its category asks for.

Wine belongs to the plan here, not the margins. The list stays Italian and curated, and the restaurant steers guests toward its own bottles rather than outside ones — a structure that suits antipasti and shared pies far better than a fast slice ever would. The dining room is small, so reservations are the honest move for a group of three or more, and dinner is effectively the only service: five o'clock to half past ten most nights, an hour later on Fridays and Saturdays. High chairs are on hand, though there is no separate menu for children; the Margherita and Cosacca tend to do that job. Larger plans get their own path, with private events running up to fifty guests on advance notice, while takeout stays phone-first and paced to the dining room — a backup for the nights you already know the order.

The effect is a restaurant that reads Roman on the pizza and broadly Italian everywhere else, pointed squarely at the planned evening rather than the drop-in. Preston Street has no shortage of Italian addresses, and Retro Gusto stakes its ground by asking for a little more — a booking, a bottle, a first course before the pie — and handing back a table you settle into for the length of a proper dinner. Start with the Retro Suppli while the group argues over pizza, and the meal has already told you what kind of place this is before the oven turns out the first pie.