[Italian] Tosto Quickfire

Restaurant: Tosto Quickfire
Location: 800 Bay Street, Unit 101, Toronto, ON M5S 3A9
Price Range: $$

[wp-review]

Located near Via Vai, I pass by Tosto Quickfire, another Italian joint all the time and decided to give it a try with a friend. The restaurant has a casual and cafeteria like vibe, but at the same time remains clean and presentable. The set up of the restaurant is quite strange, much like Nando’s except they don’t bring the food to you. The order will be placed at the counter then you have to wait for your name to be called. I supposed this process would be efficient if the restaurant was less crowded, but the calling out of names to signal order readiness can be a bit disruptive during peak hours. Thus I would suggest them to invest in buzzers or assign table numbers, this way the staff would not have to yell out the names and get frustrated when customers aren’t coming to pick up the food.

Most of the pasta ranged from $10-14 with the exception of the Nero Pasta (squid ink linguine) and the portion was more than enough to take home for later! While the presentation of this dish looked amazing with all the different colors contrasting with the black linguine noodle, sadly the taste felt short. The pasta was undercooked and I could still taste the raw wine and garlic as well, and what’s with the overused of olive oil? I kid you not, there was a puddle of olive oil underneath all that pasta. I even questioned the staff if the nero pasta was supposed to be that oily, they told me that’s how Italian pasta is supposed to be… WHAT?!?!?! Anyhow, though the staff was nice enough to offer me a different dish, I decided not to order anything else and just eat the pizza instead.

To be honest I dislike white sauce pizza and unfortunately this pie wasn’t able to change my mind. Since the patata pizza had the bechamel sauce as the base sauce, it was incredibly rich and fatty, thus it really needed something acidic to balance out the flavors. With that said, for $8 the portion was generous and more than enough for a single serving! With every bites you are getting some crunches from the potato, the dough was thin and remained soft without becoming soggy from the sauce.

While the dishes that I had wasn’t great, I am still willing to give this restaurant another try in the near future. Personally I quite liked the cafeteria-style service and I thought the overall service was great as well. If this was a “table service” restaurant then prices would probably be at least double plus tip, but it’s not, which makes it a great affordable casual dining option for the neighborhood!