Here are two short, non-imagined scenes from a restaurant.

Scene one: Cucina is a few weeks old during the Little Italy Street Festival. A friend and I walk in to eat a meal. We are moderately well-dressed. In fact, I recall we made the special effort to leave our customary outfits made of onion bags and barrels at home that night. Staff is frantic, almost convulsively so, despite the space being at 65 per cent capacity. We're hastily seated, then tersely told that many of the menu items are sold out. It's 7:30pm. A manager-looking type with stern eyebrows walks over to rescue the charming but clueless server, whose eyes are wide and watering with panic as she hesitantly fingers the top of the unpopped bottle of Prosecco ($35) we ordered. He disengages the cork and deadpans, "We're out of pesto pappardelle with wild mushrooms ($14). And the veal cannelloni ($14). And the pulled pork panini ($12). I'm going to tell you what you want. This." He taps the menu twice, pointing out the angel hair with tomato suga and basil ($14). "It's delicious." There's no time to rebut. He then grabs the menus and marches off.

We're speechless. I check again to make sure that I look presentable and non-onion-bagged. Not a scrap of orange mesh is on my person.

Scene two: my friend and his friend walk into the restaurant on a busy evening. The intention is, once again, to feed. A server looks up from bussing a table, acknowledges them, then turns away, rolling her eyes to express her irritation.

The tragedy in these scenes is not the atrocious service, but the fact that they mar such a pure and well-executed Italian menu. Il Dottore Angry Eyebrows was right, I did want the freshly made angel hair pasta, which was served in a generous interlaced twist, with its bright, clean slick of tomato-basil sauce. I wanted it so much I risked another browbeating a few weeks later and tried the tagliatelle version ($14), this time richer with oven-roasted tomatoes, the dish anchored by sweet slimy bits of garlic, roasted and deeply golden. Few restaurants in this price range bother with hand-cut fresh pasta, fewer pull off an antipasti platter that doesn't taste as if the components have come from the metal carts at your local grocery store, in rigor mortis due to prolonged vinegar exposure.

But Cucina does both, and does both well. Pasta is fragrantly doughy, sauced with appropriate moderation, the way it's done in authentic Italian kitchens. Purple and white curls of octopus ($10) are supple and yielding, dressed in a simple acidic vinaigrette. A beet salad ($8) feels as if it's seeping its perfect, B₁₂-rich juices into all the right organs, and tastes deliciously regenerative, earthy and sweet in a balsamic-tomato drizzle. The crispy paninis hit and miss -- avoid the veal, which is tough; opt instead for the aforementioned pulled pork with spiced Napa cabbage and red currant-apple chutney ($12), which is, apparently, occasionally available -- as do the crispy pizzas ($12), though none of them are egregious offenders. And they are crispy.

Not that the food quality at Cucina should come as shock. Mark Bruyea was partially responsible for Bruyea Brothers, the space's more upscale, pricier and uniformly delicious former gastronomic incarnation. Whether or not the other brother was responsible for the service that used to match the meals, one thing is clear: that kind of love is missing from the equation.

Email us at: LETTERS@EYEWEEKLY.COM or send your questions to EYEWEEKLY.COM
625 Church St, 6th Floor, Toronto M4Y 2G1