La Roma Piccola (translating as "little Rome" in Italian) is a fairly new Italian restaurant on Queen Street East in Leslieville, opening up during the late summer months of last year. This stretch of Queen East from Logan to Leslie is indeed loaded with many high quality pizza options: Frankie's Italian, Slowhand, Samaira's Kitchen, and of course my personal favourite Descendant. Some tough company indeed... La Roma has to really bring their game if they're going to impress among that type of company.
The previous tenant of the location was also an Italian restaurant named Baldini, which had been a steady presence in the Queen/Pape neighbourhood for two decades. Leslieville was seriously much, much different in 2004 (strongly suggest going on Google Maps and their earliest street view images, what a trip)... alas another one bites the dust of that era.
I'd actually been to Baldini before! For their pizza, even. However... it's another one of my "probably had a beverage too many to accurately describe this" stories. In my defense though this wasn't pure lonely sadness like my first Maestro's experience. Instead, I'd gone with an old friend for a cocktail making class at nearby Reid's Distillery... I still worked there at the time and there were some extra curricular cocktails for us once class was dismissed. My friend and I both being hungry afterwards... the only thing I recall about Baldini's pizza was an outer crunchiness to it (imagine the crust of those frozen Ristorante pizzas, which are decent for frozen pies) and also that the inside of the restaurant had such dim lighting that taking a good photo of the food was simply impossible. Very meh-to-okay... my friend's pasta dish was far superior.
Ah, Valentines Day... couples are out on the street with bouquets of flowers, red and white heart-shaped balloons, the sweet scent of love is in the air. Yeah I %*@&$ hate Valentines Day. My heart is as cold as a snowstorm of course (like the one-two punch that hit Ontario this same week), and venturing out to Leslieville at a peak dinner hour on V-Day... it was impossible to escape the constant reminder of this contrived "holiday". Hey, I'm not a total ghoul... go enjoy spending special time with the person you love, happy for ya... I just personally hate the day where around every corner it's rammed into my face both by people I know and complete strangers. Bah Humbug. Humbug I say!
Right, the review. One thing I found very interesting, upon entering La Roma, is how the inside of the restaurant is almost exactly like the old Baldini was. Sure there probably was a new coat of paint, maybe some new tables? But even then I'm not sure! The floor plan of the tables, the setup of the bar... I swear it's identical. This is also a very tight space: not a lot of room for a person to linger about and wait for a take-out order, even with the place 1/3 full (luckily I was smart and phoned for it ahead of time). Not to mention had I lingered there longer than a couple minutes, the aggressively generic classical guitar music on the playlist probably would've put me to sleep while standing.
This is the 'Diavola' from La Roma, and as you can see... it is extremely basic. "Diavola", as a reminder, roughly translates as "Devil's Fire" or "Devil's Pizza", the connotation being that such a pizza will be extremely hot with spice. Interestingly, in Dante's Inferno the final circle of hell, where Lucifer/Satan himself resides, is actually depicted as a completely cold and frozen place rather than one of eternal flame... and Dante Alighieri was of course Italian. The allegory of the very bottom of hell being a lake of ice can be interpreted as being the furthest distance from the warm love of God and heaven, thus why these very worst among sinners are not even granted the gift of heat or movement. This has completely nothing to do with pizza but I have to put all that English Literature knowledge from university to some use... plus the Inferno is just a great read.
If I'm using this review as an excuse to discuss a literary work from the freaking 14th century... probably not a good sign for the pizza.
First off, if the intention here is to be spicy (which the name 'diavola' obviously suggests) then yeah, total and complete failure here. I got no spice or heat from this pizza whatsoever... there's a slight bit in the salami if you're really looking for it but it's barely anything, plus nothing in the sauce or even a simple drizzle or sprinkle of a chili something... nada spice on a well below zero February evening here in Toronto. Plus, the salami itself is sliced so damn thin... you barely get any of it's fatty texture or flavour either. Big disappointment there.
The real strange thing about this pizza though, which I hope this awful photo helps demonstrate, is how strangely this thing cooked in the oven. You can tell that the underside of the slice is really soft, there's a solid layer of not fully baked dough there... yet the outer edges of the crust have some char to them. Nevertheless, the consistent doughiness throughout every slice really gave off a taste of this pizza being undercooked. Beyond the thicker part of the crust, there aren't any nice baked-in air bubbles within the bread... so many bites have an almost raw cookie-dough like texture to them.
And it's strange because not only is the crust well baked (a good crisp crust for the record) but the edges of the salami slices on top of the pizza are actually burnt. Not well done, like legitimately burnt. Look at the terrible picture above, the top of the slice to the left of the yellow light. You can also tell the salami is overdone by how much it's curling up on the pizza, such as in this picture below:
If Pac Man were a mediocre pizza...
Have to mention the cheese. It's bad, man. Real bad. Not even completely melted (notice the little shreds of it around the edges) and it tastes like any frozen pizza cheese you've ever encountered. You know those Pillsbury mini-pizzas you can microwave? I had those (or something similar) a lot in high school and the cheese on here tastes exactly like that... just vague plasticly texture and flavour lacking seasoning or pleasant gooeyness or anything you associate with a half-decent pizza mozzarella. Not sure I'd even call what's on here a mozzarella at all, frankly. It's cheese-like product. Among the many sit-down restaurant pizzas I've reviewed, this is among the worst cheeses I've encountered. Pathetic.
There is one thing saving this pizza from complete disaster... the tomato sauce. Like Baldini before them, it makes me wonder if La Roma is a place that does pizza just cuz and is way more focused on their pasta dishes, because this is legitimately a terrific sauce. Bright and bold, lingers on the tongue and has a pleasant fullness to it... plus little bits of stewed tomato and some oregano that add some extra zing. I truly enjoyed the bites of crust here way more, because that's both where most of the sauce was and it was the only part of the dough that actually was properly baked. A vivid tomato sauce with nicely fresh baked bread? If the whole pizza had the same quality as its outer edges, we'd really have something here instead of this slab of confusion.
On that note of confusion, this is a pizza that got better on the reheat test. Better! Normally you're hoping to just break even at best and not dry out the leftovers... here? Well because so much of that bread was soft and undercooked... frying the slices in a pan on low heat gave the bottom of those slices some desperately needed crispiness. All of a sudden, you had something kind of resembling a pastry with that still soft dough on the inside... but at least there was now a layer of separation.
Overall... a very very tough one to grade. The inherent lack of quality in the salami and especially the weak potentially frozen cheese (blech) makes it an automatic non-recommendation. But how to properly grade it? I can't give them points for being better once I lightly fried the slices... that's something I know how to do in order to make cold pizza tastier and I don't work in your restaurant. You're getting marked on what you initially served me... and it's never a good sign when the more I think about the food the less I liked it.
If not for that genuinely excellent tomato sauce, this could be near the very bottom of my Top Toronto Pizza list. If I want undercooked dough and plastic mozzarella I'll microwave a frozen mini-pizza like I did at age seventeen. But that sauce... is truly legit and I did enjoy those fluffier bites of the crust as well. Basically one third of this pizza was really good and the rest was underwhelming terrible emptiness.
All of that considered... I think a weak "C" sounds about right. Not even Top 150 I think. Memorable only for how bizarrely baked it was... but the lack of imagination with the spice, overall limited flavour and really cheap cheese on this thing... I'll almost certainly never go back. Aside from the sauce, it's almost as bland as the boring classical guitar music they played. Also... Slowhand is a short block away, their prices are similar and their pizza is actually terrific. Go there instead.
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