Lunch at Fabbrica

My cousin Donna and her kids came to visit this past week. Since Summerlicious was on my sister wanted to go and try one restaurant, Fabbrica, at the Shops at Don Mills. It's a Mark McEwan restaurant. He's also the owner of North 44 on Yonge north of Eglinton.

This is their description of the restaurant from their website: The Fabbrica mission is to create the most authentic Italian cuisine we can from the finest possible ingredients – many of them sourced from Italy, like Roma tomatoes ripened in the San Marzano valley for our sauces, and flour hand-milled in Naples for our pasta and pizza dough.

The style of cuisine is uniformly rustic and intended for the casual enjoyment in which it was originally conceived. Our 150-seat dining room is assertively contemporary, but seasoned with accents of iconic Italian style. The room is anchored at the front with a long 15 seat bar, and at the rear, by our wood-burning brick pizza oven from Naples, in which our pizzas are rendered from raw to crisp as they should be, in fewer than 90 seconds. The atmosphere is casual and convivial. Fabbrica, the new restaurant from Mark McEwan.

The lunch menu was supposed to be as follows. But, in actuality, the appetizers were different:

$20 Lunch (plus taxes and gratuity)

Appetizer

Stracciatella alla romana

Chicken broth egg and reggiano

or

Mistcanza

Seasonal lettuces, fennel, celery, herbs and house dressing

or

Olives

Mixed marinated olives, oregano, fennel and chili

Entrée

Spaghetti

Lamb Bolognese with minted ricotta

or

Pannini Milano

Spiced chick pea, grilled eggplant, olive salsa and arugula

or

Insalata pollo

Wood oven roasted chicken breast, mixed lettuce, toasted foccacia, tomato, pancetta, chopped egg and sweet marsala dressing

Dessert

Gelato

or

Sorbetti

or

Terrina di chocolate

The food was fine. I had the beet root appetizer and Panini Milano entrée with Terrina di chocolate for dessert. It's good to try new things every now and then. It's a nice looking restaurant too. I'm not sure I'd pay full price to go. But, Summer and Winterlicious gives regular Joes like us a chance to go and see what all the fuss is about.