This spirited Beaufort Street osteria both preserves and challenges Italian restaurant culture
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.
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Sydney Morning Herald
20 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Two journalists, an eclectic restaurant and Taylor Swift: Inside the making of Jac Maley's new book
Lunch begins with an editorial intervention. 'I want to say, for the record,' Jacqueline Maley – ever the journalist – announces. 'That this was on my vision board before Tay Tay came. I was so on the zeitgeist.' We're dining at Pellegrino 2000, tucked inside a historic terrace in Surry Hills, where the vibe is old-school Italian with a wink. Chianti bottles sit like trophies, tomato tins masquerade as rustic decor, and ropes of dried herbs and spices dangle above the bar. An eccentric collection of framed artwork lines the walls – including an image of the Michelin Man, beaming over the room like an ironic deity, blessing the carb-loading faithful below. It's theatrical, yet charming. The perfect setting for a pop star – or, in Maley's case, her second novel, Lonely Mouth. Long before Taylor Swift and her gal pal Sabrina Carpenter turned the restaurant into pop culture real estate when they spent the first night of their Eras and Sydney Zoo tour here, Maley was already a regular. She started visiting for the relaxed refinement and crema caramello alla banana (accompanied, no hyperbole, by an entire plate of cream!), but she kept visiting once she realised Pellegrino 2000 also served up perfect inspiration for a novel. 'It's one of my favourite Sydney restaurants,' Maley says. 'The restaurant I had in mind for the novel was elegant and cool, but it was never going to try too hard or be like a white tablecloth place. I love good food, but I hate any stuffy atmosphere.' Maley would sit at the bar, sketching details in a notepad, absorbing the restaurant's textures and rhythms. In Lonely Mouth, Pellegrino 2000 becomes the inspiration for the fictional Bocca – an Italian restaurant with a Japanese twist and a trattoria-meets–art deco aesthetic, located in Darlinghurst. Her narrator, Matilda, works there as the manager: a sharp and solitary 30-something nursing an unrequited crush on the restaurant's bad-boy owner, Colson, and quietly shouldering the aftershocks of her mother leaving her and her sister, Lara, when they were children (made doubly traumatic by the fact it happened outside the Big Merino rest stop at Goulburn, off the Hume Highway). As a menu reduces a sauce, so too does a plot summary flatten Lonely Mouth. It's a novel, rich with humour and sharp observations, about desire – for food, for love, for life – and what happens when that desire gets swallowed. It's about sisters, and mothers and daughters. And Bocca becomes more than a backdrop: it's a space where chaos meets order, appetite meets discipline, and everyone's slightly hungry for something they can't quite name. 'I knew I wanted to set the novel in a restaurant. I thought it would be a dynamic setting,' Maley says. 'I wanted it to be very realistic. I really wanted the restaurant to be like a character in the book, to be so atmospheric, it would take people there.' How many times did she visit Pellegrino 2000? 'You should ask my accountant when I put through my next tax return,' Maley quips. Mercifully, we avoid the worst part of Lunch Withs – the stilted pas de deux over the menu, the self-consciousness of wondering if one's contributions to the ordering are too much, too little, too indulgent, too virtuous. Maley takes full control, like someone who has asked far tougher questions than 'shared plates or mains'? To start, we opt for a pillowy focaccia and truffle-parmesan, an unexpectedly punchy caponata due to pickled celery, and a lush buffalo mozzarella, adorned with figs and honey. The wine stays on theme – a glass of Italian Pinot Grigio and a sharp Catarratto. Photographer Steven Siewert hovers nearby like a set designer reworking a diorama – moving errant phones out of frames, opening blinds for better light, repositioning cutlery with surgical precision. 'It is weird to be on the receiving end of what we usually do to other people,' Maley says. She has a deadline for her own Lunch With interview, with a senior public figure, looming. After completing an arts law degree, Maley started at The Sydney Morning Herald as a cadet in 2003. She comes from media stock: her mother, Judy, to whom Lonely Mouth is dedicated, worked at the Herald; her great-grandfather and great-uncle were political journalists; and her brother, Paul, was a reporter at The Australian. Maley's a senior writer, columnist, podcast host and newsletter editor and, today, the unfortunate soul sitting on the wrong side of the notepad. Yet, Maley's not entirely unprepared. This isn't our first time at the Lunch With table together. When her debut novel, The Truth About Her, came out in 2021, we met for breakfast in a courtyard of a cafe that was a little more toast crumbs than terrazzo tables. Now look at us: dining in a hot spot frequented by actual celebrities. For everyone's sake, I suggest Maley consider setting her next novel in a five-star resort. 'We're cosmopolitan ladies of the world now,' Maley retorts. 'I think we need to really level up. I'm thinking ... Denmark. What's that place? Noma.' The three-Michelin-star restaurant serves 20-course meals and regularly tops lists of the best restaurants in the world. For Lonely Mouth, Maley became something of a restaurant obsessive – fascinated by the ecosystems they contain and the quiet dramas unfolding between courses. She interviewed chefs and hospitality managers, read a stack of chef memoirs, watched YouTube videos of kitchens in action – and, for balance, quite a bit of The Great British Bake Off (the latter more for pleasure). In full Daniel Day-Lewis mode, she even picked up a few waitressing shifts. 'They were sort of a bit bemused, but they were nice about it. I just did what I was told. I think the other waiters were like: Who is this lady? But everyone tolerated me,' Maley says. 'People open up when you take a real interest in them, their lives, what they want to do, what they have done, the thing they are passionate about, and ask them to explain it to you. People were really giving that way, even though it was a weird ask, and no one really knew what I was doing.' It wasn't quite Down and Out in Paris, but the experience gave Maley what she needed: a feel for the choreography, the repetition, the small tensions and quiet triumphs of restaurant life. What surprised her was how much it resembled a newsroom – fast-paced, hierarchical, and always one dropped order away from chaos. 'It's a structured environment, but it attracts people who are unstructured in other ways. It's a little like journalism and a newsroom in that way,' she says. 'Journalists are not people who want to work a 9 to 5 job, they're in for the experience and the adventure. We're solo operators, but we have to work within an organism, which is the newsroom. Newspapers are very hierarchical, even though we're all recalcitrant personalities who don't like being told what to do.' With classic recalcitrance, I break the fourth wall to ask our off-duty journalist if she's enjoying her turn in the Lunch With hot seat. 'Are you checking in?,' Maley jokes. 'It's going great for me, but am I giving you what you need?' A master of the form, I ask Maley for her Lunch With advice – she's got the recipe down, but I'm probably still chopping onions. 'Just get them really drunk,' she deadpans. 'It's quite high pressure, I think. It's like a social interaction on the surface, but your journalist brain is constantly working. ' A pause in proceedings: the main. Pappardelle with stracciatella and truss tomatoes so ripe they look ready to explode on impact. Maley unfolds a paper napkin and tucks it, bib-style, into the relaxed collar of her blue silk shirt. She catches my eye – the journalist's brain, even now, still quietly whirring. 'Can you not put this in the piece?' A pause, a sigh, a smile. 'No, you can, if you want.' The same brain – always scanning for angles and incoming alerts– makes it hard for Maley to write fiction while working her day job. Journalism brings a constant overload of information, paired with the nagging sense you're always missing something important. And while her reporting and novels both circle themes of gender and power, she doesn't see them as flexing the same muscle. Her ideal writing conditions are long, uninterrupted stretches away from work, not trying to wedge sentences between school drop-offs, play dates, early dog walks and breaking news alerts. Annual leave became writing leave – less a break than a change of deadlines. There was also the pressure of following up the success of her first novel and being contracted to a deadline as part of a two-book deal – a deadline she fell so far behind on that she can't even precisely remember when it was. 'I didn't take a holiday in years,' Maley says. 'So I ended up, at the end of it, realising it's quite hard to juggle all of this. It took a toll on me in terms of stress levels, and so that was something that I wouldn't want to do again. ' She's got ideas bubbling away – another novel, maybe a non-fiction project – but for now, she's letting them simmer. And at least restaurants are just restaurants again, no longer research sites in disguise. Loading 'I love cooking, I love gardening. I want to take my dog for a walk, I want to watch TV,' Maley says. 'When you're writing a book, every time you're home, it's always there. And now I'm like, I want to do non-intellectual pursuits for a while.' But first, we have a joint byline to get. As a friendly waitress delivers an unplanned – but not unwanted – tiramisu, we seize the opportunity to try to get a scoop. Did Taylor Swift enjoy a tiramisu when she dined here? The response, cool and non-committal: 'Taylor Swift, who's that? I couldn't possibly say.'
The Age
20 hours ago
- The Age
Two journalists, an eclectic restaurant and Taylor Swift: Inside the making of Jac Maley's new book
Lunch begins with an editorial intervention. 'I want to say, for the record,' Jacqueline Maley – ever the journalist – announces. 'That this was on my vision board before Tay Tay came. I was so on the zeitgeist.' We're dining at Pellegrino 2000, tucked inside a historic terrace in Surry Hills, where the vibe is old-school Italian with a wink. Chianti bottles sit like trophies, tomato tins masquerade as rustic decor, and ropes of dried herbs and spices dangle above the bar. An eccentric collection of framed artwork lines the walls – including an image of the Michelin Man, beaming over the room like an ironic deity, blessing the carb-loading faithful below. It's theatrical, yet charming. The perfect setting for a pop star – or, in Maley's case, her second novel, Lonely Mouth. Long before Taylor Swift and her gal pal Sabrina Carpenter turned the restaurant into pop culture real estate when they spent the first night of their Eras and Sydney Zoo tour here, Maley was already a regular. She started visiting for the relaxed refinement and crema caramello alla banana (accompanied, no hyperbole, by an entire plate of cream!), but she kept visiting once she realised Pellegrino 2000 also served up perfect inspiration for a novel. 'It's one of my favourite Sydney restaurants,' Maley says. 'The restaurant I had in mind for the novel was elegant and cool, but it was never going to try too hard or be like a white tablecloth place. I love good food, but I hate any stuffy atmosphere.' Maley would sit at the bar, sketching details in a notepad, absorbing the restaurant's textures and rhythms. In Lonely Mouth, Pellegrino 2000 becomes the inspiration for the fictional Bocca – an Italian restaurant with a Japanese twist and a trattoria-meets–art deco aesthetic, located in Darlinghurst. Her narrator, Matilda, works there as the manager: a sharp and solitary 30-something nursing an unrequited crush on the restaurant's bad-boy owner, Colson, and quietly shouldering the aftershocks of her mother leaving her and her sister, Lara, when they were children (made doubly traumatic by the fact it happened outside the Big Merino rest stop at Goulburn, off the Hume Highway). As a menu reduces a sauce, so too does a plot summary flatten Lonely Mouth. It's a novel, rich with humour and sharp observations, about desire – for food, for love, for life – and what happens when that desire gets swallowed. It's about sisters, and mothers and daughters. And Bocca becomes more than a backdrop: it's a space where chaos meets order, appetite meets discipline, and everyone's slightly hungry for something they can't quite name. 'I knew I wanted to set the novel in a restaurant. I thought it would be a dynamic setting,' Maley says. 'I wanted it to be very realistic. I really wanted the restaurant to be like a character in the book, to be so atmospheric, it would take people there.' How many times did she visit Pellegrino 2000? 'You should ask my accountant when I put through my next tax return,' Maley quips. Mercifully, we avoid the worst part of Lunch Withs – the stilted pas de deux over the menu, the self-consciousness of wondering if one's contributions to the ordering are too much, too little, too indulgent, too virtuous. Maley takes full control, like someone who has asked far tougher questions than 'shared plates or mains'? To start, we opt for a pillowy focaccia and truffle-parmesan, an unexpectedly punchy caponata due to pickled celery, and a lush buffalo mozzarella, adorned with figs and honey. The wine stays on theme – a glass of Italian Pinot Grigio and a sharp Catarratto. Photographer Steven Siewert hovers nearby like a set designer reworking a diorama – moving errant phones out of frames, opening blinds for better light, repositioning cutlery with surgical precision. 'It is weird to be on the receiving end of what we usually do to other people,' Maley says. She has a deadline for her own Lunch With interview, with a senior public figure, looming. After completing an arts law degree, Maley started at The Sydney Morning Herald as a cadet in 2003. She comes from media stock: her mother, Judy, to whom Lonely Mouth is dedicated, worked at the Herald; her great-grandfather and great-uncle were political journalists; and her brother, Paul, was a reporter at The Australian. Maley's a senior writer, columnist, podcast host and newsletter editor and, today, the unfortunate soul sitting on the wrong side of the notepad. Yet, Maley's not entirely unprepared. This isn't our first time at the Lunch With table together. When her debut novel, The Truth About Her, came out in 2021, we met for breakfast in a courtyard of a cafe that was a little more toast crumbs than terrazzo tables. Now look at us: dining in a hot spot frequented by actual celebrities. For everyone's sake, I suggest Maley consider setting her next novel in a five-star resort. 'We're cosmopolitan ladies of the world now,' Maley retorts. 'I think we need to really level up. I'm thinking ... Denmark. What's that place? Noma.' The three-Michelin-star restaurant serves 20-course meals and regularly tops lists of the best restaurants in the world. For Lonely Mouth, Maley became something of a restaurant obsessive – fascinated by the ecosystems they contain and the quiet dramas unfolding between courses. She interviewed chefs and hospitality managers, read a stack of chef memoirs, watched YouTube videos of kitchens in action – and, for balance, quite a bit of The Great British Bake Off (the latter more for pleasure). In full Daniel Day-Lewis mode, she even picked up a few waitressing shifts. 'They were sort of a bit bemused, but they were nice about it. I just did what I was told. I think the other waiters were like: Who is this lady? But everyone tolerated me,' Maley says. 'People open up when you take a real interest in them, their lives, what they want to do, what they have done, the thing they are passionate about, and ask them to explain it to you. People were really giving that way, even though it was a weird ask, and no one really knew what I was doing.' It wasn't quite Down and Out in Paris, but the experience gave Maley what she needed: a feel for the choreography, the repetition, the small tensions and quiet triumphs of restaurant life. What surprised her was how much it resembled a newsroom – fast-paced, hierarchical, and always one dropped order away from chaos. 'It's a structured environment, but it attracts people who are unstructured in other ways. It's a little like journalism and a newsroom in that way,' she says. 'Journalists are not people who want to work a 9 to 5 job, they're in for the experience and the adventure. We're solo operators, but we have to work within an organism, which is the newsroom. Newspapers are very hierarchical, even though we're all recalcitrant personalities who don't like being told what to do.' With classic recalcitrance, I break the fourth wall to ask our off-duty journalist if she's enjoying her turn in the Lunch With hot seat. 'Are you checking in?,' Maley jokes. 'It's going great for me, but am I giving you what you need?' A master of the form, I ask Maley for her Lunch With advice – she's got the recipe down, but I'm probably still chopping onions. 'Just get them really drunk,' she deadpans. 'It's quite high pressure, I think. It's like a social interaction on the surface, but your journalist brain is constantly working. ' A pause in proceedings: the main. Pappardelle with stracciatella and truss tomatoes so ripe they look ready to explode on impact. Maley unfolds a paper napkin and tucks it, bib-style, into the relaxed collar of her blue silk shirt. She catches my eye – the journalist's brain, even now, still quietly whirring. 'Can you not put this in the piece?' A pause, a sigh, a smile. 'No, you can, if you want.' The same brain – always scanning for angles and incoming alerts– makes it hard for Maley to write fiction while working her day job. Journalism brings a constant overload of information, paired with the nagging sense you're always missing something important. And while her reporting and novels both circle themes of gender and power, she doesn't see them as flexing the same muscle. Her ideal writing conditions are long, uninterrupted stretches away from work, not trying to wedge sentences between school drop-offs, play dates, early dog walks and breaking news alerts. Annual leave became writing leave – less a break than a change of deadlines. There was also the pressure of following up the success of her first novel and being contracted to a deadline as part of a two-book deal – a deadline she fell so far behind on that she can't even precisely remember when it was. 'I didn't take a holiday in years,' Maley says. 'So I ended up, at the end of it, realising it's quite hard to juggle all of this. It took a toll on me in terms of stress levels, and so that was something that I wouldn't want to do again. ' She's got ideas bubbling away – another novel, maybe a non-fiction project – but for now, she's letting them simmer. And at least restaurants are just restaurants again, no longer research sites in disguise. Loading 'I love cooking, I love gardening. I want to take my dog for a walk, I want to watch TV,' Maley says. 'When you're writing a book, every time you're home, it's always there. And now I'm like, I want to do non-intellectual pursuits for a while.' But first, we have a joint byline to get. As a friendly waitress delivers an unplanned – but not unwanted – tiramisu, we seize the opportunity to try to get a scoop. Did Taylor Swift enjoy a tiramisu when she dined here? The response, cool and non-committal: 'Taylor Swift, who's that? I couldn't possibly say.'
Perth Now
3 days ago
- Perth Now
Hannah Waddingham 'wants people to talk about how exhausting parenthood is'
Hannah Waddingham wants more people to "talk" about "how exhausting" it is to be a parent. The Ted Lasso actress, 50, is mother to a 10-year-old daughter - who was born in 2015 during her previous relationship with Italian businessman Gianluca Cugnetto - but she has been raising her little girl alone since the couple's split and Hannah is adamant being a mother is hard work and that needs to be acknowledged. She told The Sunday Times newspaper: "Thank God she is the utter joy of my life because it is unyielding responsibility. "I feel like more people should talk about how exhausting it is. Not only physically showing up for them but being the best version of yourself, because they respond to actions far more than words." She added of her daughter: "[She's] my greatest champion and my most horrific critic." The youngster has taken an interest in acting and has been starring a school production of 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe', but Hannah wants to make her daughter away of all the hard work that went into building her own career. She said: "She feels such a sense of vitality from that [being on stage], which I love, but I just want her to know that for 22 years I would be on stage thinking: 'Am I going to make the last Tube? "I need her to be aware that I really grafted for 22 years. Life is not being picked up by a black Mercedes." Hannah added that's she proud of her career success, but she doesn't care about being famous. She explained: "I've just become more known. Being afforded the luxury of the kind of roles that I always knew I could play and, as a single mum, the luxury of being able to put my daughter in great schools. "It does give you freedom. I genuinely don't give a s*** about fame. I never have. I never will." Hannah previously admitted she battles feelings of guilt whenever she's away from her little girl for work. She told PEOPLE: "My primary function is being a single mama ... Mommy guilt is real ... But I keep saying to her that we are a team and that I have to do this. "I have to strike while the iron is hot. I'm not so conceited that I would think that I will always have this kind of focus. I've always said to her: 'Mommy must take this time while the light shines on me, because the light shines on you'."
