🤝 Meet Ryan Baddeley. He’s the co-founder and head chef of Pizzeria Badiali, one of the most popular and most acclaimed pizza places in Toronto, which opened its second location earlier this month. We spoke with Ryan about his culinary background, his favourite slice in the whole world, and what it was like collaborating with Miss Vickie’s.
What are the origins of Badiali?
It was more like a passive, fun pizza party project that I was doing with some friends while I was waiting to open another restaurant at the Paradise Theatre. And then COVID hit and everything changed.
What’s your history with pizza? You trained in Italy, correct?
I did train in Italy, but I had never made pizza before Badiali. I worked at a famous butcher shop in Tuscany and I cooked at some restaurants in Sicily, but I had never made specifically pizza, even here in Toronto. It was more something that I would have after work as a chef in my early 20s, as a late night food option. Or something I loved eating when traveling in Italy and New York. But I had never really pictured myself doing it as a career move until COVID hit.
Badiali is now very popular and famous in Toronto for its lines. When did you get the sense that what you were doing was really taking off?
We opened in mid-June 2021. I would say that year was great for us in terms of finding our footing. Then in the following spring, TikTok really started to take off for us. As well, [Barstool Sports founder and pizza reviewer] Dave Portnoy came to Toronto and gave us a really good review. I think with the momentum of that second spring in 2022, we really had a jump in interest, and that's also when we realized that we weren't able to keep up. And so that's when we started looking for ways to expand and be able to not sell out early in the evenings and keep up with people's demand.
What advice would you give to young chefs who are looking to make the jump from chef to restaurateur?
The base of having an incredibly wide array of skills in a kitchen is really an important thing to learn when you're young. One thing for me is I was never really that great at fixing things in the kitchen when they break, and I think that that's such a good skill to have as a restaurateur because everything goes wrong every day and things cost a lot of money.
And then I would say, as a cook, just being open. I cooked in a couple of restaurants for a year. I did some baking at another restaurant. I did butchery for a year at Sanagan’s Meat Locker and in Italy. It's just getting a wide variety of skills. I would have loved to have made pizza back in the day because you never know where you're going to end up. Fine dining seems really exciting in your early 20s, but you get to a point where you realize that you might not be filling everyone's needs in a community.
Are there any things people might not know about your industry that you’d like them to know?
The expectations are just as high in quick service [as they are in fine dining].
Who are your greatest pizza inspirations? What slices do you aspire to be like?
There are two versions of that. When we opened on Dovercourt, I loved the idea of just being the next generation of pizza place that was going to be there for like 40 or 50 years. And so I think that there's an aspiration to be that neighbourhood joint that sells really good pizza and sticks around.
Then there's also the people that I look up to in the industry where it's the higher-end pizzerias. Whether it's Chris Bianco, who I think is the godfather of pizza in America and makes amazing pizza in his own style. And then going to eat pizza in Rome by the slice — the quality of ingredients that they use there and the amazing produce and seasonality that they have — is something that I aspire to do seasonally with our pizza specials.
Do you have a favourite pizza place in the whole world?
It’s actually a bakery in Rome called Roscioli. It's been there for over a hundred years and they serve pizza al metro, which is a kind of long Roman-style pizza. It's typically very simply topped. I like their rossa slice, which is basically just a tomato sauce on their dough.
Last year, Miss Vickie’s made a chip inspired by Badiali’s vodka slice. How did that come to be?
It was very, very cool to be able to do something with Miss Vickie’s, not only because it's an iconic Canadian chip, but I think that it's the best chip also. They reached out to us via a PR agency. They were looking for someone to represent Toronto as a unique Italian flavour for their line of chips they were doing. They had a whole team come. Their flavour specialist came and we gave them a few pizzas to try. We were definitely trying to push the vodka pizza flavour as it was unique to us. We did a few rounds of flavour testing with them and I think they did a great job in nailing the amount of heat, the kind of dairy flavour and acidity, and little pizza oregano. And I think the branding as well, putting a slice on it was very cool.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
