Contrada: Italian Fun Dining in Little Italy

Before Contrada existed on College Street, it existed in two childhoods. Patrick Groves — the restaurant’s general manager, sommelier, and co-founder — grew up in Scarborough, eating Italian food cooked by his half-Italian mother, while his Irish side handled breakfast. 

Contrada opened on October 24, 2023, in the heart of Little Italy — and within its first year, it landed on Toronto Life’s Best New Restaurants list. It’s the kind of place that sounds like it was always supposed to be here.

Scarborough to Alo to College Street

Groves has been working in restaurants since he was 13. He’s 34 now. The early years were spent at places like Vincent’s Spot — a romantic, white-tablecloth Italian restaurant in Scarborough opened by an Italian man in the 60s, later run by a Greek family — where he fell in love with dimly lit rooms and veal cutlets. From there, the path wound through Bent, a deep dive into bartending and cocktails, and two openings with the Alo Group: bar manager at Aloette, then at Alobar Yorkville.

After that came Brothers Food and Wine — “one of my favorite restaurants in Toronto history” — where he shifted from cocktails to wine. Then a stint as sommelier at Giulietta, a run as GM at Paris Paris, and a year selling wine to Toronto restaurants. When Contrada finally came together, Groves had two decades of experience spread across every corner of the industry.

Vieira’s path ran parallel — culinary school, then kitchens under Susur Lee at Lee and Bent, and a brief stint at Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal. “When we were roommates,” Groves says, “the Joe Beef cookbook was our Bible. It sat on our coffee table. We opened it every two days to go back and read a story or cook something.”

Modern Italian, the Way Toronto Eats It

The menu by Chef Lifni is Italian at its core, but it doesn’t pretend to be from any one region of Italy — and it doesn’t pretend to ignore the rest of the world. “We are kind of international products,” Groves says. “We take things from around the world, and that’s not an inorganic process. It’s something that is natural to us.”

The result is what Groves calls modern Italian — in the same spirit that the restaurants he trained in might use the term modern French. There are Latin American inflections, French techniques, Asian touches — all threaded through an Italian sensitivity that governs the structure and the soul of the food. “At its core, it’s Italian,” he says, “but it’s a mix of old world and new world.”

If he had to sum up the approach in two words: “Playful but sophisticated. We don’t take ourselves too seriously, but we take the work seriously.”

Aperitiki and Amaro with Tropical Juice

Groves oversees the full beverage program, and the cocktails at Contrada reflect the same instinct for cross-pollination. He describes the approach as “aperitiki” — a blend of Italian aperitivo traditions and tiki modes, elevated to work alongside a meal rather than compete with it.

“We love the Italian tradition of Negronis and spritzes,” he says. “But we also love a tiki bar because of its opulence and its celebratory qualities.” The result is drinks where Amaro meets fresh tropical juice meets seasonal Ontario ingredients — thoughtful enough for someone who’s picky about cocktails (Groves counts himself in that camp), fun enough for someone who just wants a good time. Bar manager Kevin Nitcheu executes the program with precision.

A Wine List That Leans Neoclassical

If the cocktails are playful, the wine list is quietly ambitious. Groves writes it himself, and his guiding principle is what he calls “neoclassical” — low intervention in spirit, classical in sensitivity, but never the obvious bottle.

“If I bring something classic onto the list, it’s never Tignanello,” he says. “It’s always a B-side, always a step to the left.” He pours Aglianico from Basilicata, Sagrantino from Umbria, cool Lambrusco, and macerato wines from Lazio and the north — producers that reward curiosity. He credits Brothers Food and Wine for shaping his palate, and the list reflects that lineage: serious wine knowledge carried lightly, with a genuine excitement for the underdogs of Italian viticulture.

Wood, Leather, and Facebook Marketplace

The room was designed by Groves and his then-partner Jessie Mak — no design firm, no contractor. The space, a former gastropub, was transformed in six weeks on a tight budget, with an electrician friend, a millwork specialist, and a lot of hours on Facebook Marketplace hunting vintage furniture.

What they found surprised them: mid-century modern pieces, many of them made by Southern Ontario furniture makers in the 1970s, stamped with their markings. “We looked for the aesthetic first,” Groves says, “and were pleasantly surprised with how much local furniture we found.” The room is all wood and leather, warm and earthy and lived-in — the physical expression of a word that Groves keeps coming back to: warmth.

“From how we hired the staff to how we designed the space,” he says, “warmth is the word.”

The Embrace at the Door

The service at Contrada is the thing Groves may be proudest of. He describes it as a hybrid of the Alo Group’s professional rigor and the human spontaneity he learned at Brothers Food and Wine — leaning toward the latter, but with the steps always done.

“When you walk through our doors, we take you in our arms and we don’t let you go,” he says. “Not in an aggressive way — it’s an embrace. You can kind of just let go, and someone will catch you.”

Two and a half years in, the consistency hasn’t dropped. “Every day is day one,” Groves says. “We’re never resting on our laurels.” It’s a restaurant built by people who spent twenty years learning what a good night out feels like — and who now get to give that feeling to someone else, every night, on College Street.

Written by Daniel Neuhaus
Photography by Daniel Neuhaus

Updated on July 08, 2026

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