The Serve - This Week: Hip Italian

The Sunday Age

Sunday June 1, 2008

Restaurant reviews by Dani Valent

4/5 Pizze Vini Spuntini

Shop 3, 1 Carre Street, Elsternwick, 9077 8815

Licensed + BYO AE MC V Eftpos

Tuesday to Sunday, 5.30pm-late

Entrees $9-$13, mains $13.50-$25, desserts $7-$11

Well, dunk me in napoli and twirl me: this is a first. I've never before been excited about shopping-mall food infiltrating neighbourhood strips, but I'm excited about this place, more or less transposed from Chadstone Shopping Centre.

Pizze Vini Spuntini isn't a bland, liveried franchise elbowing in to make our world more homogenous. It's a real restaurant with a vibrant personality and excellent food, owned and run by Chaddy's Caffe Vini Spuntini team.

There, you can get pizza by the slice and real-world coffee that makes it possible to plunge back into the gleaming marts of the so-called fashion capital. The Elsternwick version is more of a proper dining room, with a bigger, better menu, but it's similarly savvy and snappy. Importantly, Pizze Vini Spuntini gives the Italians who run this business more room to demonstrate their brilliant service.

The room is a concrete-and-glass box. Yes, it's noisy (take-away is available and there's an outdoor apron). The A3 paper menu also acts as a place mat. You might snack on arancini, cold meats, perfect flour-dusted shallow-fried calamari or eggplant parmigiana, layered with house-made napoli and parmesan, then baked to a luscious, moist mess in a porcelain dish. It's terrific.

Also served in its baking dish is the old-school lasagne, with pork and veal ragu and fresh-egg pasta.

Like everyone here, chef Anthony Mortellaro has done time at Melbourne's original hip Italian restaurant, Caffe e Cucina, but his lasagne recipe comes straight from nonna.

The short list of main dishes - seafood linguine, porcini risotto, veal cutlets - is outshone by the pizzas, thin-based and square-edged and lightly topped with lovelies. We wolfed down the simple, sublime pizza San Daniele with prosciutto, parmesan and rocket.

There's a short list of mid-priced wine, most of it available by the glass.

For afters, the tarts are good, but I'm dedicating this winter to the limoncello and burnt sugar crepes, cross-hatched with grill marks, with the perfect sticky balance of tart notes and caramel succour.

The restaurant is managed by another Caffe e Cucina alumnus, Gianpiero de Thomasis. (His brother, Antonio de Thomasis, owns the two Vini Spuntinis and was a co-owner of Caffe e Cucina alongside Maurice Terzini, back in its pumping, early days.) De Thomasis is one of those true hospitality guys. Look at him, pouring beans into the coffee machine, wiping smudges from wine glasses, delivering food with an efficient lope, opening a bottle so we can try the wine before we buy.

It would be a rare Italian restaurant in Melbourne unable to trace at least part of its lineage to Caffe e Cucina: the place should be heritage-listed. Recent alumni openings include Pizza e Birra in Fitzroy Street, the related Caffe Veloce in South Yarra and Maurice Terzini's new zillion-dollar restaurant at Crown, Giuseppe, Arnaldo and Sons.

I like GAS, but it's big and impersonal and getting a table is a palaver. I rate the sharp, relaxed service in this suburban 40-seater just as highly. The GAS food offering is more extensive, but, where the two restaurants go head to head (calamari, eggplant parmigiana, for example), I'll be returning to Elsternwick in preference to lining up with the shiny people at Crown.

Tips and pans to theserve@theage.com.au

Also try

Giuseppe, Arnaldo and Sons, Crown, Southbank, 9694 7400. Tuesday to Sunday, noon-4pm; daily, 6pm-late

Caffe e Cucina originator Maurice Terzini has splashed back to Melbourne with this big, impressive restaurant. I don't like the no-bookings policy (we arrived at 6.45pm and waited an hour for a table) but the free-range salumi, stuffed pig's trotter and farfalle with game and peas are exceptional.

Caffe e Cucina, 581 Chapel Street, South Yarra, 9827 4139. Daily, noon-10pm

Melbourne's original groovy Italian cafe has been trucking on since 1988 so it's got to be doing a lot of things right, among them spaghetti with crab and scampi, T-bone with mash and the tiramisu. The table for two on the upstairs balcony still rates as one of Melbourne's most romantic places to eat.

Sarti, 6 Russell Place, city, 9639 7822. Monday to Friday, noon-3pm; Monday to Saturday, 6pm-late

Like almost every other Italian chef in Melbourne, Riccardo Momesso did a stint at Caffe e Cucina. He's been around the traps since then, fetching up as co-owner of this classy laneway restaurant. Come for shareable stuzzichini (stuffed quail, Wagyu carpaccio), beautiful pastas and the pork with blood-orange glaze.

© 2008 The Sunday Age

Back to News Index | Back to Home