Pizzeria Badiali

Badiali is the Italian spelling tucked inside the Baddeley family name, and Ryan Baddeley hung it over a slice shop. That detail tells you most of what the menu goes on to confirm: this is a pizzeria run by a restaurant cook, not a slice counter that happened to hire one. Baddeley came up through Toronto kitchens and a stretch cooking in Italy, then aimed all of that at the most casual format pizza has — a pie cut into squares, sold by the slice, meant to be eaten standing up. The shop opened on the corner of Dovercourt and Argyle in 2021, a small storefront with a counter and a short row of seats.

The pizza reads like a slice-shop list and cooks like something more considered. The Vodka Pie — spicy vodka rose sauce, fior di latte, pecorino and padano, Sicilian oregano over the top — is the one that travels through local conversation, and the Burrata Marinara sits right behind it, crushed tomato and shaved garlic and basil finished with burrata. The Cacio e Pepe pie translates the pasta straight onto dough, cacio sauce and pecorino and black pepper over fior di latte. From there the list fans out: a clean Margherita, an Original Cheese built on whole-milk mozzarella, a Salami and Hot Pepper carrying Calabrian heat, a Mushroom Bianco with caramelized onion and ricotta. Underneath all of it is a two-flour dough given a long, slow fermentation and a California tomato sauce — the groundwork that reads as lightness and chew rather than as technique.

What sets Badiali apart is less any single pie than the care given to the parts most slice shops treat as afterthoughts. The salads are real cooking: a Chopped Salad of arugula, radicchio and romaine with Genoa salami and artichoke heart, a Caesar Supreme finished with white anchovy and Grana Padano, a vegan version kept on the list for the table that needs one. The dips are made in house — a creamy pepperoncini, a green garlic ranch, a hot honey for the crust. Even the pineapple pizza is built as an argument rather than a concession, the Capicola and Pineapple leaning on red onion and Calabrian chili to give the sweetness something to push against.

The path into pizza was not a straight one, and by his own account it began at home. Before the pandemic reshaped the restaurant business, Baddeley was a fine-dining cook making pizza as a side obsession; local reporting traces his kitchen years through Bar Isabel and Bar Raval and an opening run at Osteria Rialto, along with time spent cooking and learning in Italy. When the dining landscape shifted, the home project became the plan. He opened Badiali with partners Nick Halligan and Owen Walker, and the slice shop inherited the instincts of someone who had spent years on dinner service — which is why a takeout pie here arrives with seasoning and balance usually reserved for a plated course.

What began as a corner shop has become a Toronto pizza reference point, and a second location has since opened elsewhere in the city. Yet the Dovercourt original still behaves like the neighbourhood shop it was on day one: a short menu, a counter, a line that forms on the sidewalk at lunch and reassembles at dinner. The growth has not rewritten the idea so much as confirmed it — that a restaurant cook's standards and a slice shop's plainness belong on the same square of dough. Order a Vodka Pie at the counter and it comes back cut into squares, seasoned and balanced and finished, then handed over in paper to eat on the walk down Dovercourt Road.