NATURALLY BETTER
Low-fi wines and flavour-forward dishes fire up Italian-accented good times in a buzzy, no-fuss setting,
It’s a simple dish. Five sardines, heads and tails removed, plump bodies resting in a pool of zesty, chartreuse-coloured Tuscan olive oil. The silvery fish come laid out in a row, almost hidden by a soft tangle of sharply soused onion strands. Over the top is a scatter of toasted pine nuts and a scant fistful of raisins so plumped up they’re almost grapes again.
La Lupa, a wine bar-pizzeria in Brisbane’s West End is best known for its Roman-style pizze, but the kitchen’s take on this Venetian classic, sarde en saor, is a tasty tutorial in how to layer flavours brilliantly. The first forkful lands a vinegary smack that speedily builds into a flood of sweet and sour, then finishes with a rich savoury backbeat.
This antipasto, dressed with oil from the chef-owner’s family’s farm in Italy, illustrates the team’s laser focus on using good ingredients to create big-flavoured crowd-pleasers. And it’s just one reason why this unpretentious spot should be on your radar.
If you’re swayed by street appeal, this 65-seater may have escaped your notice. It opened in 2017 at the base of one of the big apartment blocks in this rapidly changing suburb. La Lupa’s low-key brick and concrete interiors spill onto the pavement, with crossback chairs and timber-topped tables arrayed behind a glass fence. There’s nothing to mark it out. Take a closer look and you may spot an off-duty somm savouring downtime with a glass from a naturally-inclined Italianate drinks list, perhaps with lupacchiotti alongside. Those in-the-know, know.
The name La Lupa means the wolf in Italian and Lupa’s lupacchiotti (wolf cubs) is a house specialty. It looks like a pre-cut pizza, but the base is more billowing and bronzed. Crafted from a 60-hour fermented dough made on less refined Tipo 1 flour, yours might arrive crowned with olive tapenade, marinated eggplant, burrata and basil. Or maybe with burrata, silky mortadella and pistachio cream. Or a punchy combo of gorgonzola, prosciutto and pear. Think of it as preloaded focaccia.
Owners expat Italians – chef Valentina Vigni from Siena and her partner Andrea Contin of Padua, a consummate drinks wrangler and front-of-house guy – are both handson. A clutch of wines by-the-glass are chalked on a blackboard, but Contin loves chatting about finds. My Negroni arrives beautifully bitter and bold with orange peel twist volatiles in the mix. The usual ingredients are bolstered by Barolo Chinato, a complex Umbrian aromatised wine adding more layers.
Vini Curto’s Barolo Chinato is just one of many artisanal drinks, including Piedmont maker Argalà’s saffron and jasmine concoctions, a grappa line-up, amari and more. Alongside natural Italian wines, there are also Slovenian, Georgian and Turkish offerings.
You’ll want focaccia to mop up the buffalo milk ricotta base of a Romanstyle baked artichoke starter. But pace yourself. Consider instead the scarpetta (little shoe) sourdough, designed for the civilised Italian practice of plate wiping.
A nest of spaghetti props up briny scampi from Western Australia and there’s more sweet meat threaded through a complex tomato-based sauce, studded with umami depthcharge cherry tomatoes. A snow of bottarga adds brio. Cue more scarpetta.
Friendly and accessible, La Lupa embodies the spirit of La Cucina. It’s that rare neighbourhood gem worth crossing several suburbs to visit.