THE NEW ORDER
Indian-spiced trippa alla Romana, yuzu risotto, vegan cacio e pepe. The latest wave of restaurant openings is Italian, but not as you know it, writes LARISSA DUBECKI.
The latest wave of restaurant openings is Italian, but not as you know it, writes Larissa Dubecki.
Ah, the rules – the endless rules – of Italian food. No milky coffee after breakfast; no parmesan with seafood pasta; al dente, always; and keep your hands off the bread until the food arrives, you imbecille. And let us not forget all the produce-driven pieties. The pasta makers in their dusty white shrouds of tipo “00” flour. The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN), the Opus Dei of pizza, flexing its might all the way to the New World.
Say what you like about Italian food’s countless orthodoxies, they’ve gone a long way to keep it safe from the creative efforts of chefs eager to make their mark. Yet here we are, staring down a giddy year that has turned the verities of
Italian food into a game of free association. Featuring star players such as an Indian-spiced trippa alla Romana and a Chinese Bolognese pizza, all bets are off as the third wave of Italian food crests without threatening to break.
From Alberto’s Lounge in Sydney (home of that tripe) to Leonardo’s Pizza Palace in Melbourne (home of that pizza), the most exciting openings of the past 12 months are Italian, with varying degrees of -ish. Menus have veered from classic to outré and all ports in between at Sydney’s Don Peppino’s, Bella Brutta, Bistecca, Mary’s Pizzeria and Matteo Downtown, and in Melbourne at Di Stasio Città, Pentolina and Capitano. Even Melbourne vegan temple Smith & Daughters has gone Italian, with chef Shannon Martinez dishing the faux on fritto misto, melon and prosciutto panzanella, and cacio e pepe.
You pretty much know Italian food is having a moment when Sydney’s Swillhouse Group (the blokes responsible for Restaurant Hubert, The Baxter Inn and Frankie’s Pizza) get behind it. Daniel Pepperell may have won kudos for his Italian-inflected menu at 10 William St, but he’s the very mark of a modern chef who
has traipsed through the envelope-pushing kitchens of Oscillate Wildly, Attica and New York’s Momofuku Ssäm Bar, picking up a grab-bag of French and Asian tricks along the way.
That trippa alla Romana is really a child of the world, the result of a trip to Paris during which Pepperell noted the abundance of bistros adding Indian hints to their food. It’s gently spiced with fenugreek, garam masala and cardamom, and rich with cream, and Pepperell describes it as “almost like butter chicken, only with tripe and guanciale and pecorino”.
The tripe is the outlier, however, for a take on Italian that mostly dresses up its new tracks with a traditional face.
“Generally, at Alberto’s it looks Italian, it tastes Italian, but there’s a lot of little things we do that aren’t Italian. With the octopus, for example, we serve a fava bean purée that’s cooked out with loads of kombu, just upping the umami where we can.”
It is, he acknowledges, not the kind of thing your average Puglian trattoria would serve. But in other ways it’s faithful to the Italian diktat of using what’s available here and now.
“Being authentic Italian is using what’s around you. Authentic Italian in Sydney could be using local ricotta made in Marrickville, tomatoes grown in the Blue Mountains.”
And cop this, AVPN pizza masters: “I reckon the exporters make up those rules about only using San Marzano tomatoes and all the rest, so they sell their products here.”
Italian restaurants have been a comforting certainty in Australian dining life since mass migration in the 1950s and ’60s. In a nation where a million people claim Italian descent, our relationship with food from the 20 regions that make up The Boot has until recently been a fairly uncomplicated, nostalgia-soaked love affair. But there comes a time in every cuisine’s life when it has to make its own way in the world, subject to the whims of chefs with less regard for its iron-clad traditions than its native-born sons and daughters.
The shibboleths binding Italian food to the quasi-mystical realm of the Piedmontese nonna’s kitchen are disappearing, thanks to chefs like Capitano’s Casey Wall. Fun fact: before opening in Melbourne’s Carlton last year, he’d never visited Italy. The North Carolina native instead tipped his hat to the Italian-American food scene of north-east United States, especially his beloved New York red-sauce joints.
“Italian-American food is completely different to Italian food, but just as delicious,” says Wall.
“Generally, at Alberto’s it looks Italian, it tastes Italian, but there’s a lot of little things we do that aren’t Italian.”
“In a way what we’re doing at Capitano is Australian-Italian food based out of a whole different region of Italy known as
New York, Philadelphia and New Jersey.”
Wall was more or less an Italian cleanskin when the first three-cheese pizza emerged from Capitano’s stone-floored electric oven with a fat, blistered crust and plenty of flex in its broad fermented-sourdough base.
“I had never worked in an Italian restaurant before Capitano,” he says. “I’d never made pasta before, never made pizza in any restaurants. All my reference points were amazing Italian-American joints you find in America, especially New York pizza, which doesn’t really happen here.”
See also: Capitano’s veal parmigiana, the much talked-about bone-in behemoth covered in pizza sauce, mozzarella and basil leaves that feeds two. One of the best-known examples of an “Italian dish” in America, veal parmigiana is a telling example of what historian Eric Hobsbawm dubbed “the invention of tradition”. While Sicily was the home of eggplant parmigiana, the dish came about when Italian immigrants to the US, typically from impoverished towns in the country’s south, embraced their new prosperity in food form.
“The comically large meatball was another direct result of the ease of affording the food they’d previously seen only rich people eat,” explains Wall. “It was a bit like the American dream: ‘We can afford meat now, and we’re going to eat it’.”
So what of Aussie-Italian traditions? Have we, like the Americans, sprouted off from the evolutionary tree to create our own readily definable cuisine, or are we stuck in a netherworld, peddling an ersatz version of Italian that requires an invisible set of inverted commas? Michael Harden, GT’s Victoria editor and the author of Lygon Street: Stories and Recipes from Melbourne’s Melting Pot, says the culinary landscape would be radically poorer without the influence of Italian immigrants who asserted themselves boldly into their new home, despite the produce-led deprivations that saw olive oil sold only in chemists (as a health tonic) until the mid-1960s. Melbourne in particular, due to its concentration of Italian migrants in Carlton, found it was economically viable for local restaurant owners to serve Italian food that didn’t need to be “Australianised” as it was elsewhere in the country.
“Non-Italian Melburnians learnt to eat Italian food that was close to the dishes being served in homes in Italy, albeit with some necessary improvisations ingredient-wise,” says Harden. “The other interesting thing about Carlton’s Italian community was that they came from a lot of different regions and so the type of dishes being served reflected their origins in Veneto or Calabria or Sicily or Piedmont. The offer was more diverse than you would find in a single region in Italy at the time. I’ve spoken to people whose Italian parents or grandparents had
never eaten pizza before they arrived in Carlton. So when you’re talking Aussie-Italian food I think it’s more about a notion of pan-Italian than fusion.”
It can be hard to know whether to celebrate or sneer at Lygon Street, Melbourne’s Little Italy. Maybe both. A tricolour pioneer, it produced Australia’s first pizza house (Toto’s, in 1961, still going strong), its first commercial espresso machine (University Café, in 1954) and the first shop selling mozzarella and extra-virgin olive oil (as an edible foodstuff). In its modern incarnation, it has become the wall-to-wall home of identikit restaurants pushing a notion of Italian food highly unlikely to pass muster in Bologna. The hallowed notion of “authenticity” certainly becomes problematic when faced with the classic Aussie-Italian pizza topped with matchstick ham of no fixed address and gassed olives that resemble tap washers.
“There’s a bit of a sentimental notion that these cookie-cutter joints on Lygon Street, with their oversized laminated paint-by-numbers menus, are somehow representative of Australian-Italian cooking,” says Harden. “That’s like saying McDonald’s represents American cooking. Many of those places only opened in the ’80s and ’90s, when zoning laws on a part of Lygon Street were changed. They were there solely for the tourist dollar, with a faux authenticity just like restaurants that cluster around Montmartre in Paris or Greenwich Village in New York. Sure, they tell a story, just not the whole story.”
Federica Andrisani, of Hobart’s Fico, met her partner,
Oskar Rossi, in northern Italy six years ago and sealed their bond over a pitch-perfect pasta pomodoro. “Oskar said that was when he fell in love with me, when I cooked something so simple and so delicious,” she says.
It’s safe to argue close readings of tradition have had their day when even a Neapolitan native who shudders at Australian pizza (“I’m scared of it”) sees no reason not to embrace local ingredients while gently pushing boundaries in dishes such as bug tail carpaccio flavoured with yuzu and seaweed dust.
Some things, of course, remain inviolable. Pasta must be al dente. Risotto must be cooked the right way (laboriously, with lots of elbow grease). Dishes should be a simple collection of three or four ingredients. But Andrisani and Rossi enjoy playing with a bigger toolbox.
“Italian flavour is based on umami. Parmigiana, tomatoes, colatura – the fish sauce made from anchovies – but because we don’t always have the same ingredients here it makes sense to find an inspiration from the Japanese flavour profile which is so similar,” says Andrisani. “We make a sea urchin risotto with yuzu instead of lemon, and we like to use seaweed for umami flavour in a dish. It’s still very traditional, but a little twist with the same flavour profile.”
Their brand of respectful reinvention mirrors the state of play in Italy. The barbarians have stormed the regional citadel, with Roman cacio e pepe journeying south and Sicily trading its pasta alla Norma to the northerners in return. Massimo Bottura at Osteria Francescana has proved conclusively you can simultaneously enrage your countrymen and women with innovation and be named the best restaurant in the world.
Ironically, the biggest pushback Fico receives comes from diners with Italian heritage. “The third-generation Italians who grew up in Australia are the least open to our food,” says Andrisani. “They really have no idea, because they grew up with their mums cooking the worst Italian food. They see what we do and get all upset and we have to try to explain it to them. Sometimes it’s a battle you can’t win.”
It’s a battle worth fighting, nonetheless. Or at least discussing vigorously over spaghetti Bolognese, that beloved Esperanto dish of unknown origins, with an umami-giving slosh of fish sauce. Almost anything goes in this brave new Aussie-American-Italian world – just so long as you don’t overcook the pasta.
“Of course you’re going to see some interesting things when people from all sorts of backgrounds start opening
Italian restaurants,” says Casey Wall. “Not just people whose names end in vowels.”
It can be hard to know whether to celebrate or sneer at Lygon Street, Melbourne’s Little Italy. Maybe both.