Pasta and pie

Chez Divito’s simple and
tasty food hits the spot

by MARK SLUTSKY

Sometimes a restaurant is just exactly what you want it to be, and that’s okay—it doesn’t need to be particularly fancy or sophisticated or forward-thinking. There’s something comforting about a reliable neighbourhood spot, inexpensive, with simple, well-prepared food, for those nights when the world is particularly freezing and wind-blasted and you get home and damn it, you just don’t feel like cooking.

I’m not ashamed to admit that simple Italian-American fare has always been comfort food to me, so when a restaurant opened around the corner that boasted a house special spaghetti and meatballs, I have to admit my interest was piqued. If you ask me, this city could use a few more “red sauce”-style Italian restaurants.

So on an incredibly cold, blustery and otherwise disheartening winter evening, we paid Chez Divito a visit. It’s in a cute little space on Parc across from Philinos just up from Villeneuve. Not exactly a hotspot, but a little corner that’s seen some nice stuff spring up in the past couple of years—the aforementioned Philinos, cupcake bakery Cocoa Locale, Carribean Delight, and more recently, wine bar/charcuterie Buvette Chez Simone just up the block.

If you have a thing about privacy or personal space issues, this may not be the resto for you: it’s quite snug, though I liked the intimacy of the setting. There’s a handful of tables and a tiny open kitchen right up front, a small pizza oven in the back and even a little deli counter tucked away. Like I said, cozy. Nice. Perfect on a cold night.

We started out tasting the soup, which comes with every meal—the choice that day was cream of celery, which was satisfying if not particularly exciting. Okay, it was a little bland, but warming enough. We then dug into the antipasto platter ($11.99). There’s a seafood-only option that’s a couple of bucks more, but the fruits of the sea were pretty heavily represented in our plate, which could have been a meal unto itself. Cold marinated octopus was very tasty—not super-tender, but not too chewy either. There was also a generous serving of smoked salmon, a little on the salty side, but kind of addictive as well, and a green salad with sun-dried tomatoes.

I was already pretty much half-full when our mains showed up, and they proceeded to destroy me—this is really filling food, as it should be. I had the spaghetti and meatballs ($13.99) with a marinara sauce, a hearty and satisfying meal. No real surprises here, but a very pleasant rendition of a real classic and one I’ll probably be back for on another blustery night soon.

There’s plenty of variations on pizza on the menu, and to be perfectly honest, my hopes weren’t too high—I’ve been burned too many times on ’za in this crazy town. So the pizza at Divito came as a pleasant surprise. We went for an all-dressed situation with sausage, bacon, green peppers and mushrooms ($13.99) and it was really very good. The crust was thin and crispy, the sauce had that rich tanginess that I always hope for, and despite the abundant toppings, the whole structure never felt heavy or haphazard or greasy. A solid little pie. High marks. We could barely finish the thing, we were so stuffed, and that’s when they brought out a fresh fruit platter—melon, cherries, Clementines—on the house, which we valiantly attempted to devour. (It should be noted that the fruit was particularly fresh-tasting, considering the time of year.)

They haven’t reinvented the wheel at Chez Divito and frankly, that’s not such a bad thing. A quality pizza/pasta joint with a friendly atmosphere is always a good addition to a neighbourhood in my book, and I’ll definitely return whenever I have a yearning for that particularly welcoming type of cooking next.

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