Pizza Bistro

Order the Mediterranean Sun Pizza and the whole kitchen arrives on one sourdough base: artichoke, zucchini, green olives, sun-dried tomato, arugula, and goat cheese, arranged less like a pizza than a Greek table that happens to come round. That single pie explains Pizza Bistro faster than the name does. This is a downtown Stratford kitchen that treats the pizzeria format as a floor rather than a ceiling — a bistro with a pizzeria spine, where the sourdough pies share a menu with grilled seafood, dips, and small plates drawn straight from the Greek-Mediterranean side of the kitchen.

The pizzas hold the centre and range wide: a classic Margarita, a four-cheese Quattro Fromage, a white Pizza Bianca, a Greek Style pie for tables that want tradition, and calzones for anyone folding the format shut. A twelve-inch gluten-free base is there for guests who need it. But the small plates are where the cooking shows its hand. Grilled Calamari comes with fennel, arugula, beets, and a lemon vinaigrette rather than the usual fried-and-forgotten treatment; Crispy Halloumi lands salty and sharp; Lamb Keftedakia, Saganaki, Spiced Eggplant, Tzatziki, Red Pepper Hummus, Fava Bean Puree, and Garlic Pickled Beets fill out a spread that rewards a table ordering in rounds. Pasta keeps its own corner — Linguine Carbonara, Linguine with Shrimp, and a Spaghetti Beef Bolognaise for the plainer appetite.

What that breadth points to is a place built for shared, staged ordering rather than one main per person. A table can open with halloumi and calamari, move to a Greek Village Salad, land on a Mediterranean Sun Pizza, and never repeat itself — a different proposition from a slice shop with a phone number. Value is written into the model just as plainly. The takeout sheet runs all week: a large four-topping pizza around fifteen dollars, a pizza-and-pasta combo, a two-pizza bundle, and a six-tapas deal served with grilled pita. Takeout here is not the leftover business a dining-room restaurant tolerates; it carries its own offers and its own pickup and delivery windows. Beer, wine, cocktails, and spirits round out the dine-in side.

That range makes the practical case, too. The menu is easy to build a group around — shareable plates, pizzas cut for the table, salads and pasta — so a party that can't agree still finds its plates. Families get a clear path through pizza and pasta without stranding the adults on a plain pie, and vegetarians can assemble a full meal from the hummus, tzatziki, pickled beets, Greek Village Salad, and halloumi alone. In warm months a patio opens onto the downtown, adding a fair-weather option to a dining room that already works year-round.

The restaurant is family-run, and its Stratford chapter is a return. According to local reporting, the family behind it came back to the city after a stretch in Greece and reopened the bistro downtown in 2024, on Downie Street. Individual names stay lightly held; the story that carries is the comeback itself — a kitchen re-established on home ground with its menu refreshed around sourdough and Greek-Mediterranean cooking. "The bistro is back" was how the local coverage put it, and the present menu reads like a kitchen making good on the line.

Stratford's downtown runs on its theatres, and Pizza Bistro sits in the thick of it, a few steps from the Avon. The address does quiet work: it makes the place a pre-show table when the curtain sets the clock, and a straightforward one the rest of the time, when a group wants pizza and a few Greek plates without staging a production of its own. The kitchen does not chase the festival crowd so much as feed the town around it — a sourdough pie, a plate of keftedakia, a bundle for the drive home — all of it held together by a family that decided Stratford was worth coming back to.