Where to eat pizza in Ottawa — according to five years worth of Ottawa Citizen resto reviews (2025)

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Read the full Colonnadereview, published Apr. 9, 2024.

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KS on the Keys

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Like the Colonnade, KS on the Keys is one of Ottawa’s pizza old-timers. The South Keys eatery’s original location opened in 1971, and like the Colonnade, it’s a Lebanese-owned business known for its timeless, particular-to-Ottawa, hefty, cheese-blanketed pies. The KS pizza (pepperoni, mushroom, green pepper, green olive) will make lovers of old-fashioned combination pizza swoon. More modern palates might prefer Colonnade’s “gourmet pizzas,” which were more like flatbreads that featured garlicky or barbecue sauces and chicken.

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Read the full KS on the Keysreview, published Apr. 9, 2024.

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Tangerine Pizza

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This 15-year-old Italian-Canadian eatery in Gloucester has won over regulars who like hefty, heavy-on-the-toppings pies such as the Tangerine special, came fully loaded with pepperoni, green olives, mushrooms and crisp bacon. The mom-and-pop operation also grows some vegetables that feature in its food, and its vegetable and bean soup was surprisingly good.

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Lil Z’s Pizza

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Lil Z’s vegetarian “Lil Z” pizza, with ricotta, garlic, chili flakes and more on an everything-bagel crust.

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This ByWard Market pizza place consistently made pizzas with distinctive and enjoyable crusts that were thin but both sturdy and chewy, less Neapolitan and more North American. Of the more creative pizzas, we really liked the eponymous Lil Z ($20), a vegetarian pizza that delivered a cavalcade of flavours thanks to ricotta, garlic, red onion, chili flakes, basil, and lemon zest, plus zucchini, on an “everything bagel” crust that also had hits of hot honey, the pizza garnish of the moment.

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Giulia

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Pepperoni pizza at Giulia on Elgin Street

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This sibling brand of the Ottawa restaurants Riviera, El Camino and Datsun opened its first pizzeriain the summer of 2021 on Elgin Street. More recently, a second location in the ByWard Market opened. At one visit, the pepperoni pizza was a showstopper — zestily sauced, notably, but not excessively salty and blessed with a fine, thin crust that combined crunchy blistered spots and stretches of pleasant chewiness.

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Farinella

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The two Farinella locations — the 2019 original in Little Italy and its 2021 Kanata spin-off — specially in oblong, Roman-style creations with bread-y bases that are almost one-metre long and toppings that “are strictly traditional,” according to Ottawa-raised co-owner Cesare Agostini, who spent four years making pizza in Rome. Past highlights have included a potato pizza, flecked with rosemary and notably peppery, some mushroom pizza that tucked its fungus under dollops of gloriously molten whipped ricotta, a pizza that played vibrant fresh tomatoes against their sun-dried cousins and some utterly simple zucchini pizza. While the first Farinella did roaring business selling pizza basically by the slice, the pies now are sold in full-metre and half-metre sizes.

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