F'Amelia Restaurant, Toronto.

This Cabbage Town resto, in a part of old Toronto, has a comfortable interior filled with young families and boomers enjoying the casual environment. I came for the pizza made in their wood burning oven.


I began with celeriac ravioli accompanied by pulled duck and root vegetable sofrito, seasoned with nutmeg butter sauce and accompanied by watercress. The fabulous flavours of this dish were accompanied by reasonably delicate pasta.

I ordered 2 pizzas, first to arrive, the "Norcina", topped with fior di latte cheese, mixed mushrooms, house made pork sausage, prociutto cotto, cream and nutmeg.  They make good pizza here and I liked the flavours, but this one was a bit on the bland side and could have used more sausage for both texture and flavour. I liked the crispy dough. It had a pleasant taste accented by the faint, smoky flavours of the oven.

The second pizza was topped with crushed San Marzano tomatoes, fior di latte cheese, sliced eggplant, sliced zucchini, cherry tomatoes, asparagus, basil leaves and olive oil. Another good pizza with much bolder flavours than the Norcina.

I always enjoy tasting any "olive oil cake" offered at a restaurant. This dessert is a challenge for a kitchen in getting the texture and fruity olive flavours to come out just right. F'amelia offered a fig and olive oil cake with a caramel sauce. The concept sounded good. However, the raisin filled cake was unexpectedly rather dry. The cake had a very pleasant fruity aspect from the olive oil but that did not compensate for the unpleasant texture.