il Mercato Trattoria

il Mercato Trattoria is Bedford's most-decorated restaurant: a warm, noisy Italian kitchen that has been anchored in Sunnyside Mall at 1595 Bedford Highway since the early 2000s, winning The Coast's Best Bedford Restaurant readers' poll in most years since 2013. Part of the Bertossi Group — the restaurant family behind The Bicycle Thief and Ristorante a Mano — il Mercato has served handmade pasta, pizza, and antipasti since 1994, outlasting its own downtown sibling. It earns its place in any Halifax-area food itinerary alongside the picks in our Halifax Dining Guide.

The Trattoria That Outgrew Downtown

il Mercato was born in 1994 on Spring Garden Road, downtown Halifax's main street, and for its first decade it was a city restaurant. "I think il Mercato stole a little bit of Halifax's heart," Bertossi Group's John Michael Brewer told The Coast in 2015, describing the restaurant that "got its start on Spring Garden Road, but continues to blossom" in Bedford. The Bedford room, tucked into Sunnyside Mall on the Bedford Highway, opened in the early 2000s and quietly became the bigger love. When the downtown version eventually closed and its room was reborn as La Frasca under the same group, The Coast consoled readers that il Mercato's "diehard fans can at least take comfort" in the suburban original. Comfort turned out to be an understatement: by 2022 the paper noted that people had been "flocking to the Sunnyside Mall for nearly 20 years."

That survival is the story. Halifax's dining scene churns constantly, and suburban mall restaurants rarely top anyone's list. Yet this is the room that outlived its downtown sibling, its mall's own retail ups and downs, and two decades of restaurant openings, on nothing but the food.

Seven Straight Golds and a Citywide Pedigree

The Coast's Best of Halifax poll has a Best Bedford Restaurant category, and il Mercato has owned it. The trattoria took the gold in 2013, and from 2015 onward it won nearly every year the poll ran. "For the seventh time in a row, il Mercato Trattoria has taken home the gold for Best Bedford Restaurant," The Coast wrote in 2022, with the streak continuing through 2024 and the gold returning again in 2026. Citywide, it has been a repeat podium finisher in the hotly contested Best Italian Restaurant category, no small thing for a kitchen reachable by mall escalator.

The paper's 2019 blurb captured the room better than a menu could: "First date, birthday supper, family meal, girls' night out — it's all happening under il Mercato's roof any night of the week."

Bedford's Crown: Why the Streak Matters

Bedford is not short of food institutions — The Chickenburger, the decades-old diner down the road at 1531 Bedford Highway, and Finbar's Irish Pub inside the same Sunnyside Mall address are both perennial poll contenders, and they bookend the Best Bedford podium most years. That il Mercato keeps beating them, and keeps placing citywide in Best Italian Restaurant against downtown rooms with dedicated wine programs, says the kitchen competes well above its suburban weight class. The voters are regulars: families who book the same booth, couples who have celebrated anniversaries there for a decade, and Halifax diners who drive out of the downtown specifically for the pasta. A mall address is usually a compromise; here it is merely where the table sits.

Handmade Pasta, a Sprawling Menu and Wine That Matters

The kitchen's brief is traditional Italian, executed with contemporary polish. "Since 1994, il Mercato has delivered award-winning Italian cuisine in an inviting and dynamic atmosphere," the restaurant says of itself, promising "a fresh, contemporary take on traditional Italian flavours" and "authentic, handmade Italian food." In practice that means a menu The Coast described as "sprawling... pastas, pizzas and antipasti," with the pasta made in house and the plates built to be shared across a table rather than curated for one quiet diner. The wine list is treated as seriously as the food: the restaurant pitches itself as "the perfetto place to relax with friends and family while enjoying a great glass of wine," and the bar pours the kind of Italian reds a trattoria menu calls for.

The pacing is classic trattoria: antipasti to start, a pasta course worth slowing down for, and mains that make the room loud by eight o'clock. Come hungry and let the meal run long.

The Mall Location and the Sunday Reality

There are trade-offs, and they are the predictable ones. Il Mercato sits inside Sunnyside Mall, so the approach is a parking lot rather than a cobbled street; what you trade in atmosphere-approach you get back in free parking and a table you can still get on short notice. It is closed Sundays, full stop, which has caught out more than one visiting family. Reservations are handled the old way, by phone or email rather than an online booking widget, and weekend evenings fill early, so a Friday or Saturday table needs a call ahead. The room itself is "a buzzing, noisy gathering place," in The Coast's words: energetic, family-scaled, and definitively not quiet. Diners chasing a hushed fine-dining room should look downtown; everyone else will take the buzz with the bruschetta.

Practical Information

Address & Location
1595 Bedford Highway, Sunnyside Mall, Bedford, NS B4A 3Y4 — about 15 minutes from downtown Halifax along the Bedford Highway, with the mall's parking lots at the door.

Hours of Operation
Monday to Saturday, 11 AM to 10 PM. Closed Sundays.

Reservations
By phone or email — call (902) 832-4531. Recommended for Friday and Saturday evenings.

Price Range
Mid-range trattoria pricing — pasta-forward and gentler than the downtown fine-dining rooms.

Getting There
An easy drive or bus ride up the Bedford Highway from downtown; Sunnyside Mall's lots make it one of the easiest restaurant parks in the region.

The Bertossi Group's other rooms — The Bicycle Thief on the waterfront, Ristorante a Mano, Via Condotti, Matadora, and Pane e Circo — dot the downtown core, but il Mercato is the one Halifax keeps voting for, and the twenty-minute drive up the Bedford Highway to find out why is a local ritual. Pair it with a Bedford ocean-front stroll or make it the reliable dinner before an early flight; either way, book the table.