Pizzeria Libretto - University

The pizza at Pizzeria Libretto's University Avenue branch comes out of a custom domed oven made in Naples by Stefano Ferrara, fired hot enough to char the rim of a crust in about ninety seconds. The dough ferments for seventy-two hours, the bake runs above 850 degrees, and the base stays classic: San Marzano tomato and fior di latte on a twelve-inch sourdough round. That is the Neapolitan method as Libretto has practised it in Toronto since the start, and the kitchen treats the plain Margherita as the test it has to pass before anything else on the menu gets attention.

From that base the pizza menu widens in two directions. The Neapolitan pies run from the Funghi — a white pizza of cremini mushroom, gorgonzola crema, thyme and rosemary — to the 'Nduja, which loads spicy Calabrian sausage, stracciatella and basil onto the same crust for diners who want heat and richness at once. Beside them sits a New York lane built on a sixteen-inch thin sourdough: a straightforward cheese pie, a hot soppressata finished with hot maple, a cup-and-char pepperoni. A chicken-pesto pie and a Diavola heavy with spicy salami, olives and crema di peperoncino push the list further, and the Prosciutto & Arugula stays the order for anyone who wants something cooler off the same oven.

The kitchen does not stop at pizza. Antipasti bring buttermilk fried calamari with almond romesco, arancini of arborio risotto and scamorza, and a plate of beef, pork and veal meatballs in house sugo under shaved pecorino. The pasta arrives fresh from Enoteca Sociale — braised beef rigatoni in onion sugo, basil pesto gnocchi with roasted pistachio and stracciatella — and a mascarpone tiramisu spiked with prosecco and espresso closes the meal. Plant-based diners get a real path rather than a side salad: vegan cheese, a dedicated vegan pizza and a gluten-free crust make a mixed table easy to seat.

What makes the University Avenue address work is how many ways there are to use it. The kitchen runs from eleven in the morning to ten at night, seven days a week, which turns a serious pizza program into something a Financial District table can reach for at noon as readily as at dinner. A nineteen-dollar lunch special runs daily until four, pairing a Margherita pizzetta or a sandwich with a salad. Weekday happy hour, from two to six, drops the price on arancini, meatballs and focaccia and adds beer, wine and an Aperol spritz. Midweek, Wine Night takes half off bottles on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The sixteen-inch New York pies and the antipasti spread make it simple to build a table for a group that can't settle on one order. With reservations and takeout on top, the offers read less like discounts than like a set of instructions for using the place on a schedule.

The Libretto name goes back to 2008, when Max Rimaldi opened the original location on Ossington and helped turn Neapolitan pizza into a Toronto category rather than a novelty. Executive chef and partner Rocco Agostino has carried the cooking since, holding the restaurant to the Verace Pizza Napoletana standard — Naples flour, the long ferment, the wood-fired domed ovens — while letting the menu pick up its New York section and the dietary range a downtown crowd expects. The University branch came later, bringing that lineage to a long, high-ceilinged dining room a few steps off University Avenue's stretch of courthouses and bank towers.

What the branch offers, then, is the Libretto method without the pilgrimage. The craft that once meant a trip to Ossington now plates a lunch meeting, a pre-theatre table or a Tuesday bottle of wine in the middle of downtown. The oven holds the same temperature it always has; what has changed is who can reach it, and when.