About Us

Scaramouche has played a vibrant part in Toronto for more than thirty years. Domestic and international reviews have been uniformly excellent but to sustain a restaurant over this span of time requires the loyal support of our guests - every day. Our guests have come to Scaramouche to celebrate their most special occasions and many have also come to view it as their second home. As a youthful 30-year old, our restaurant's focus has remained unchanged: to provide our guests with an exemplary dining experience that encompasses the best of contemporary cuisine in a convivial setting. Chef/owner Keith Froggett, partner Carl Korte and the Scaramouche team look forward to making your next dining experience a memorable one.

The Character Scaramouche

Begun in the sixteenth century, the Commedia dell’arte was a form of theatre in which plots were improvised around a continuing set of stock characters. Populist in nature, comedic points were scored with the masses by caricaturizing the affectations of the aristocracy while portraying the servant class to be wily schemers two steps ahead of their deluded masters.

The character of Scaramouche was the singular creation of one of the most celebrated performers of the seventeenth century, Tiberio Fiorilli. A self-taught mime and acrobat, Fiorilli achieved enormous success by imbuing the buffoon figure of the Capitano, usually a military personage of outlandish narcissism and arrogance, forever revisiting highly dubious exploits of his largely illusory career, with the practical smarts of a roguish servant, or zanni. Thus Fiorilli created the archetype of the cynical adventurer more likely to defuse a potentially violent situation with his wits than his sword (cf. The Jacques character from Shakespeare’s As You Like It).

The name of Scaramouche might well have been lost to history had the English novelist Rafael Sabatini not seized upon it as the nom de guerre of his eponymous hero. The sentence which appears scrolled across the mural on the east side of the Pasta Bar and Grill – “He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad” – is the first line of his 1921 novel, which, in the style of Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel, recounts the adventures of a rakish young aristocrat thrust by chance into the turbulent politics of the French Revolution. Lawyer, lover, man of action, his clownish behaviour offers his enemies the opportunity of dubbing him “Scaramouche”, giving him the perfect disguise to hide behind while saving his confreres from Madame Guillotine. Such was the popularity of the book that thirty years later it was turned into a movie starring Stewart Granger, although to people of the present generation the name lingers on thanks to the eternal question posed by Queen in the surprise hit, Bohemian Rhapsody: “Scaramouche, Scaramouche, can you do the fandango?”