Comedy set turned pizza eatery

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This article was published 29/07/2016 (3571 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A small-screen restaurant will soon be serving up customers for real.

The building known by locals as Dark Roast — used primarily by Canadian skit comedy series Sunnyside — was recently approved as the location for a new pizza restaurant.

164 Langside St., on the corner for Langside Street and Sara Avenue, is owned by siblings Jason, Shelley and Ryan Armstrong, and they say using the heritage building for an eatery was always the plan.

“When Sunnyside came along… it was postponed,” Jason said.

The City of Winnipeg’s board of adjustment approved plans to open a fully licensed restaurant at a July 27 meeting at City Hall.

“This is a big moment,” Shelley said upon walking out of the meeting.

The restaurant’s working name is Corticelli, which Jason says has stuck around since they began planning. It will be open evenings to start, with a succinct menu of appetizers and personal pizzas, accompanied by wine, beer and cocktails.

The restaurant’s interior will feature a large bar as well as table seating. The tentative menu offers creative pizza combinations such as the Jimbo: pear, dill oil, red onion and gorgonzola, as well as cheese and butcher boards, among other appetizers.

“There’s no timeline,” Jason said of the project. “It’d be nice if it was this year, in 2016. That would be awesome.”

Jason is a red seal chef and currently lives in Calgary with his wife, who will be doing design for the restaurant. Shelley lives a few streets away in Wolseley and says she can’t wait to see this addition to the neighbourhood.

“We want to be good neighbours,” she said. “It’s a really charming building, it attracts a lot of attention. Our hope is to be a nice, quiet space for people to come have a bite to eat, a glass of wine. Mostly people walking to the restaurant, biking.

“We want to really be a part of the community and, I’m a social worker, so from my perspective I want to use it to give back to the community in some way.”

Jason said eventually they’d like to be open during the day to serve coffee as well, but knows from experience as a restaurant owner in Calgary that the process will take time. He said they are going for a traditional aesthetic to match the tone of the building.

“We really want to make sure the building looks historic and doesn’t look too new,” Jason said. “It does look old, it was a grocery store.”

The building is marked as a West Broadway Heritage Site, according to the plaque on the outside wall, which explains that these kinds of brick buildings were typical for the Chicago School. The large outside windows were intended to display goods and the upstairs apartment suites were likely used by the shop owner or rented out.