Shake Shack and Pizzeria Badiali Team Up for a Three-Item Collab Toronto Can’t Stop Talking About
Pizzeria Badiali has spent years earning one of the most reliable lines in Toronto — the kind of block-long queue that forms outside its Dovercourt storefront on a regular weeknight, not just a special occasion. Now that reputation is crossing over into unexpected territory: a limited-time menu collaboration with Shake Shack that blends both brands’ greatest hits into three genuinely new dishes.
The centrepiece is the Spicy Vodka Chicken Parm — Shake Shack’s crispy, white-meat chicken breast layered over a custom Badiali-and-Shake-Shack hot pepper mix, topped with Badiali’s cult-favourite spicy vodka rosé sauce, aged parmesan, sliced mozzarella and fresh basil, all stacked on a toasted potato bun. The sauce itself is the sandwich’s real anchor — the same slow-cooked tomato, onion, garlic and cream base (vodka, despite the name, isn’t actually in it) that made Badiali’s vodka pizza a citywide obsession in the first place. To keep the flavour identical to what’s served at the original shop, Badiali’s own team is handling the sauce prep themselves rather than handing off the recipe.
Alongside the sandwich, Pizza Fries take Shake Shack’s crinkle-cut fries and dust them in Badiali’s house pizza seasoning — a blend of garlic, oregano, tomato powder and parmesan — served with the shop’s housemade pepperoncini dip. Dessert comes in the form of a shake blending Brio Chinotto, the bittersweet, Toronto-made soda that’s been a staple of GTA pizzerias for decades, into Shake Shack’s frozen vanilla custard. For Ryan Baddeley, Badiali’s founder and the chef behind the collaboration, the Brio pick was personal — he grew up drinking it at every neighbourhood pizzeria and has kept it on Badiali’s own menu ever since.
“Badiali has always been about doing simple things really well. Shake Shack gets that,” Baddeley said of the partnership. “These three dishes are exactly what they should be, nothing more.”
The collaboration marks Shake Shack’s second local chef partnership after last year’s collab with Mimi Chinese, and it follows Badiali’s own limited-edition Miss Vickie’s chip flavour, which was also built around the shop’s signature vodka sauce. For Shake Shack Canada, the partnership fits into a broader effort to spotlight homegrown talent — business director Billy Richmond framed it as part of the brand’s ongoing commitment to championing the local names shaping Toronto’s food scene.
The timing lines up with a bigger moment for Badiali more broadly: alongside the Shake Shack news, the team has also been finishing work on a second permanent location in Mirvish Village, a bigger, café-style space designed to move beyond the original shop’s standing-room-only footprint. Between the chip collab, this partnership, and an expansion in the works, it’s been a fast few years for a pizzeria that only opened its doors in 2021 — and one that, by all accounts, has managed to scale without losing the identity that built the line down the block in the first place.