Fellini’s Italian Cucina

Fellini's Italian Cucina answers a question Stratford asks often: where a table lands for Italian comfort food without ceremony — a midday plate of pasta, an early dinner before a show, a calzone boxed up on the way home. The restaurant has sat on Ontario Street, in the downtown core near Market Square, long enough that regulars order by memory. It is family-owned and built around an unfussy promise — pizzas, pastas, calzones, classic entrees, and the breads and desserts to round them out — with the kitchen making most of it in-house and the dining room open for lunch and dinner from Tuesday through Saturday.

The menu's centre of gravity is pasta and stone-oven pizza. Nonna's Meaty Lasagna layers seasoned beef and pork with marinara, mozzarella and ricotta, and arrives with grilled olive bread; Penne Marcello runs grilled asparagus, roasted red peppers and smoked bacon through a garlic cream sauce. The pizzas lean specific rather than standard — the Brasato carries braised beef, caramelized onion and salsa verde over roasted garlic oil, and the Puzza finishes capicola, gorgonzola and portobello with a thread of truffle oil. Calzones come folded around fillings like Italian sausage or pepperoni and portobello with marinara for dipping, the PEI mussels arrive two ways in either a Sambuca cream or white wine and pesto, and the Chicken Parmigiana leans on olive breadcrumbs and a sundried tomato pesto under its mozzarella.