BLACK SKIRT (974 College, at Rusholme, 416-532-7424, blackskirtrestaurant.com) Complete dinners for $50 per person (lunches $25), including tax, tip and a glass of Chianti. Average main $25/$13. Open Monday to Saturday 9 am to 10 pm. Lunch from 10 am, dinner from 5 pm. Closed Sunday, some holidays. Licensed. Access: one step at door, washrooms in basement. Rating: NNNN
Rosa Gallé and Aggie Decina’s Black Skirt may only have launched in January, but their old-school trat looks like it could have been there forever.
Push open its front door and enter a portal to Toronto’s distant past, a time 50 years ago when real Italian cuisine wasn’t found in pricy restaurants but in laundry-strewn basement kitchens and vine-trellised backyards. Walls have been stripped back to the brick, well-worn floors refinished and a new open kitchen watched over by faded family photographs installed out back.
Gallé and Decina failed to get a similar rustic concept off the ground at Wish on Charles a couple of years ago. Seems Sicilian spaghetti sauce and luxe South Beach-style white linen banquettes don’t go together that well. But in this former taxidermy shop, customers gladly get stuffed these days.
From an all-day card, we start with slices of cornmeal-dusted Riviera baguette served from an old paper bag fashioned into a cornucopia before following with lemony house-made octopus carpaccio ($12.95) on a bed of organic baby arugula tossed with capers, marinated mushrooms and crunchy diced celery.
That same baguette, now nicely grilled, shows up piled with meaty fillets of imported white anchovy and chopped tomato with raw garlic. Cousin to Campagnola’s spiedini, the Skirt’s skewered lamb speducci (both $8.50) arrive alarmingly tender, barely kissed by the fire.
From the panini lineup, pressed muffuletta spread with black-olive tapenade comes stacked with tissue-thin slices of capicola, mortadella and hot soppressata as well as a garden’s worth of pickled giardiniere ($10.95). As much as we love California Sandwiches, the Skirt’s beautifully breaded veal sandwich dressed with the Decina family’s sweet San Marzano tomato sauce, provolone and charred strips of fiery banana peppers ($11.95) is our new standard-bearer.
At Wish, crispy rice arancini the size of baseballs stuffed with ground veal, green peas and mozzarell’ were 8 bucks a pop. Here in the low-rent district, they’re $3.95. Decina’s marvellously retro Sunday Night Spaghetti with that’s-a-spicy meatballs ($17.95) and not-to-be-missed veal ‘n’ ricotta ravioli ($14.95) with fried sage leaves in butter also make welcome returns.
And if authentic cannoli studded with crushed pistachios ($6) and textbook tiramisu ($8.50) don’t turn you into a Skirt chaser, the news that old friend and Queen Margherita (see listing, page 42) pizzaiolo Romolo Salvati is helping the gals perfect their soon-to-be-introduced pizza recipe certainly will.
“The food we cook comes from family,” says Gallé. “We don’t know fancy. We know sit down, eat and share.”
stevend@nowtoronto.com
