Gio's Edinburgh

Giovanni Pia has won the UK's Best Pasta Chef title twice, and his sfoglini roll the day's pasta at a counter in view of the door, so the calamarata you order was sheeted hours before it hit the water.

Why go

Giovanni Pia won UK's Best Pasta Chef at the Pizza, Pasta and Italian Food Association awards twice, in 2016 and again in 2021, after years cooking in Falkirk, Stirling and Alloa.3 He built an Edinburgh following in lockdown selling homemade pasta kits, and opened this room on Slateford Road in February 2025. What the two pasta titles buy you sits inside the door: a counter with several sfoglini working on it, making the day's pasta.2 The kitchen windows are large enough to watch from the pavement.1 A sfoglina rolls and cuts by hand rather than pushing dough through a die, and the difference lands in a rougher surface that holds sauce. His argument with the local version of the cuisine is specific: the seafood pasta is built on a bisque where the Scottish-Italian default is cream. A bisque is a shellfish stock reduced with its own roasted shells, so the sauce carries the shellfish twice and needs no cream to hold together.

The pizza list runs both doctrines, alla romana thin and crisp through the base and alla napoletana with a thick charred rim over a thin center.2 The dining room is brick, wine bottles and oversized murals, one of them a statue eating a slice of pizza. Before it opened, Pia papered the windows with adapted movie posters, including a Goodfellas parody with himself in the suit and the line As far back as I can remember I've always wanted to open a restaurant in Slateford. The unit had been a restaurant before, more than once, and had failed each time.2 Pia also appears on STV's Live at Five and cooks live at Edinburgh's Lamborghini dealership.3 The restaurant has since featured on the Italian television show Little Big Italy.4

Order this / avoid

Order: the calamarata. Wilkins named it as standing out, alongside the bruschetta starter and the cannoli: baby squid, cherry tomatoes, Gaeta olives and a pistachio pangrattato.1
Order: anything seafood off the pasta list, for the bisque.
Order: the cannoli. Pia came past the table and filled it there, and dipped it in pistachios on request.1
Order: the olive all'ascolana. Stuffed olives, breaded and fried twice, and a Le Marche specialty that almost nobody outside Italy still makes by hand.2
Order: the aglio e olio, which is rarely on an Edinburgh menu at all: garlic, oil, anchovy and chilli, loosened with pasta water, with whole small tomatoes through it.2
Order: the tiramisu, which took a category of its own at the Scottish Italian Awards in November 2025.
Avoid: driving to it. Parking on this stretch is tricky and the bus stop is at the door.1

What locals & experts say

Kirsty Wilkins, Bite Magazine (February 2025): she reviewed it in its opening month. Pia's own line to her: It's been emotional, actually. She reports that since opening the restaurant has every weekend been full, and that they turned people away on a Monday launch night. Her verdict lands on what the kitchen is trying to do: it is redefining Scottish pasta, which is normally heavy, creamy sauces. She left with a return trip planned. We'll be back for that tiramisu.1
UK Italian Awards 2026, best new Italian restaurant in the UK, won. A nominate-and-vote programme run by an events company, so it measures a following as much as a kitchen. The ceremony was in Mayfair and the Edinburgh Evening News reported it on 1 April 2026.4
Scottish Italian Awards, November 2025: best chef to Pia, best tiramisu to the restaurant. Same programme family and the same public vote behind it.4
Bite Magazine returned a year on (February 2026) and described the room the way a diner meets it, threading past the pasta counter into what the piece calls Don-like sophistication and glitz.2
Giovanni Pia, after the London ceremony (2026): It was a surprise going down to London against a lot of big operators and coming home with 3 awards. Just shows a small local neighbour restaurant can keep up with the rest. He put the win on the trade: without them Gio's is simply a name on the door, it's the customer and locals who make us great.4

Good to know

Hours: Monday to Thursday from 4pm to 10pm, Friday to Sunday from noon to 10pm, as published in February 2025. Weekend lunch is the only daytime service, which none of the timing vocabulary describes cleanly, so the published hours below do the work.
Booking: worth doing. Weekends were full from the opening month and the room is not large.
What the awards are: three of the five come from a programme decided by public nomination and vote, which is a real signal about a neighborhood following and a weak one about cooking. The pasta titles are a trade association's, and they belong to the chef rather than to this address.
Getting there: Slateford Road, about two miles southwest of the center. Bite files the block as Shandon and Jeff's list as Merchiston; Shandon is the street and Merchiston the district. A bus stop is at the door and parking on this stretch is tricky.
Prices: no source publishes one. Expect neighborhood-Italian money.
Not the same business: Gio's Delivered is Pia's separate delivery kitchen at 487a Calder Road, with its own registration and its own reviews. Judge them apart.
Hygiene: Food Hygiene Information Scheme Pass, inspected 15 May 2025, no re-inspection pending. Fourteen months old and current.5

Verdict

should-visit — RUNG DID NOT MOVE. should-visit in rounds 2 and 3, and pass 3's subtractions do not touch what it rests on. The standout axis is the pasta and the case for it is built from the independent evidence, not from the conflicted piece. Giovanni Pia won UK's Best Pasta Chef at the Pizza, Pasta and Italian Food Association awards twice, in 2016 and 2021, before this room existed. Kirsty Wilkins, an independent bylined reviewer, records that the pasta 'is made fresh at the restaurant every day' and that you can catch it through the kitchen's windows from the pavement, and her verdict is on what the kitchen is arguing for: it is 'redefining Scottish pasta, which is normally heavy, creamy sauces', by combining bisques into the seafood pasta. A shellfish stock reduced on its own roasted shells carries the seafood twice and holds without cream, which is a technical position rather than a slogan, and it is the sort of specific choice this rubric weighs heaviest. Anne Pia's one-year-on piece adds the sfoglini counter inside the door, the olive all'ascolana, the aglio e olio and both pizza doctrines, and it is used for what it describes only, because the writer shares the chef's surname with nothing published establishing whether they are related and she prints his first name as Giorgio where two other sources print Giovanni. The rung survives without her: two trade titles to the chef plus an independent review of daily-made pasta and a stated method is a genuine standout on one axis. It stops short of must-visit cleanly. No award here scores at the door, because three of the five come from a nominate-and-vote programme run by an events company and the two real ones belong to the person and predate the February 2025 opening. Nothing independent has revisited in the eighteen months since the opening month. And the kitchen's own position is tempered rather than pure, since cream with pasta and pineapple on pizza stay on the menu because the neighborhood wants them.