This spirited Beaufort Street osteria both preserves and challenges Italian restaurant culture

The Age

08-05-2025

In a maximalist dining room serving minimal intervention wines, a firebrand Perth chef is connecting the past and present of la cucina vera.
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The legendary Alba white truffle. Beguiling Barbaresco and Barolo wines. The dainty filled pasta, agnolotti di plin: just three regional food and drink specialties one might associate with Piedmont in northern Italy.
One of Piedmont's lesser-known foodstuffs, however, is Testun di Barolo. A cow and goat's milk cheese aged in grape skins, Testun is an example of formaggio ubriaco: 'drunken cheeses' preserved with wine and alcohol. Testun is also Piedmontese slang for a hard-headed person, which makes it a very apt name for a restaurant committed to doing Italian food its way.
Where was your response to news that the Trequattrini family opened their brash Beaufort Street osteria three years ago?
Broadly speaking, diners could be split into two groups: those that fell hard for Testun's maximalist decor and soundtrack that mashed together Saturday night at the club with Sunday lunch at nonna's house.
And traditionalists that clutched their rosary beads at the presence of fermented soy butter and 'hulk sauce' on the menu, plus the word stronzo on the welcome mat.
My initial reaction to Testun could best be described as one-foot-in-each-camp. I appreciated the thinking behind the concept, yet the music, the explosions of colour and the heavily worked nature of some dishes overwhelmed me. More wasn't always more.
I'm not sure if it's because I've mellowed or the restaurant has, but Testun today feels like a tamer, more approachable beast that the restaurant that gatecrashed the Beaufort Street food scene circa 2022. You'll still be serenaded by more 4/4 kick drums than your average restaurant playlist, but the vibe no longer shouts 'rave'.
Groups of 20-somethings sporting baggy, ankle-high pants and Carhartt still form a healthy chunk of the crowd here, yet so do family units including smartly dressed parents and grandparents wearing sensible shoes. Both sets of diners look right at home, thanks in no small part to the enthusiastic floor team led by restaurant manager Antonio di Senzo. He's also the person to quiz about the wine list: a collection of lo-fi, minimal intervention wines with a similar sense of fun as the restaurant.
Testun's food also tastes a little more settled and focused. Gone is the cosmopolitan exuberance that defined many of the kitchen's earlier efforts: in its place, dishes cooked with generosity and a curiosity about globalism's impact on la cucina vera. This isn't Italian food that's been trapped in someone's grandmother's basement for decades, but rather Italian cooking that's been raised in Australia, but allowed to travel the World Wide Web. Or in the case of chef Christopher Caravella: although he spent more than a decade at his family's legendary Freo restaurant Capri, it was eating at suburban restaurants and takeaways as a kid that helped shape his palette.
So that grilled skewer of ruffled mortadella sluiced with a zippy barbecue sauce and fingers of golden turmeric-stained pickles is an homage to a certain multinational fast food empire ruled by a clown named Ronald. Maple syrup and Vegemite lend the sweet and the salty to the whipped butter served alongside fat planks of fluffy, panettone-like focaccia.
The bad news: team Testun no longer makes its own Umbrian-style salumi that starred on its opening menu. The good? They've sweet talked butcher Nathan Marinelli of Lot 24 into making bespoke, globetrotting sausages for the restaurant. Right now, the kitchen is rolling a salsiccia di pollo alla Siamese over its charcoal grill: Thai-inspired chicken snags sharp with galangal and lemongrass. Is Perth's dining scene entering some sort of sausage factory golden era? The signs are promising.
Asian cookery also underpins herbal lamb rump braised in liquorice root and served on a bed of cooked coix: a white, barley-like grain also known as Job's Tears. If some Michelin-starred Italian chef was tasked with reworking Malaysian-style bak kut teh for the business class menu on ITA Airways (RIP Alitalia), it'd probably taste and look something like this. In a good way.
Occasionally, the kitchen's creativity gets the better of it. I suspect some will find the fiery fermented chilli on the spicy tuna crostino too spicy. The crunch and char of coal-grilled spaghetti – a reinterpretation of fiery spaghetti all'assassina – left me confused.
Yet it's testament to the vibrancy of Caravella's food that missteps like these haven't deterred me from returning, especially when such high-risk-high-reward cooking yields home runs a la a warm rice pudding dessert starring fennel-poached pears and golden clusters of caramelised cornflakes inspired by Honey Joys. At a time when fewer restaurants seem to be taking risks on their menus, bold thinking like this needs to be applauded.
For all of Testun's renegade behaviour, it still upholds many (Italian) restaurant ideals. You can get a very classic Caesar salad. Family members and partners are key characters of the story, not least di Sanzo's partner and pasta maker Marta Rosati, while Caravella's sweetheart Martina Ciotti brings honey and kitchen power to the party.