Osteria Ilaria.

Osteria Ilaria

They opened it one shopfront from Tipo 00, the pasta bar people queue outside, and then put almost no pasta on the menu.

Why go

Luke Skidmore and Andreas Papadakis built this in the old Scandi Bar Du Nord on Little Bourke Street, using the same architect as Tipo 00, Briony Morgan (Time Out). The brief is a modern Italian osteria with the rest of Europe allowed in: lamb cutlet, zucchini flower, salumi, duck with nettle gnocchi, and a bread section carrying several loaves including a 48-hour fermented sourdough and a gluten-free grain bread (Broadsheet). Underneath the floor is a large cellar used for storing wine and curing meat. The room runs high tables and noise at the front, booths at the back, and a long bar joining the two before it turns into an open kitchen, which is where Papadakis went back to cooking after the Tipo years. The wine list wanders to Portugal, France and Georgia.

Order this / avoid

• Order: the paccheri with prawns, which is what the city comes for. Then the thing the kitchen actually wants to be judged on, which is the chargrilled whole octopus laid over nduja, or the whole whiting, or the roast chicken. Take bread.
• Avoid: treating this as Tipo 00 with better chairs. Pasta is a small part of the menu on purpose. If you have not booked, aim for the high tables at the front, which are kept walk-in.

What locals & experts say

• Larissa Dubecki, Time Out Melbourne, on the central irony: It's ironic to the power of ten that the dish that's become Ilaria's de facto signature is pasta.1
• The same review, filing the complaints, which is the half worth reading: the lamb tartare arrives dressed up but the illusion falls apart in a mix-it-all-in outbreak of the colour puce, and They might also want to nix the nasturtium leaves, the modern answer to the parsley garnish.1
• Time Out's current best-of-CBD list, at number 14: this larger, more formal counterpart would prefer to be known for their plates of chargrilled octopus over nduja, whole whiting or roast chicken. The wine list is relatively low-intervention but pairs well with the food while remaining friendly to the wallet.2
• No third-party chef names it. Its own head chef Jett Alexander appears in Melbourne's chef-vote corpus, but as a voter for somebody else's bar, and a chef cannot vouch for the kitchen they run.4

Good to know

• Where: Little Bourke Street, just south of Elizabeth, a shopfront from Tipo 00. No source reached here gives the street number, and the restaurant's own domain does not resolve.
• Booking: worth making for the back of the room. The high tables at the front are kept booking-free.
• Cost: Time Out prices it two of four.
• Diet: a gluten-free grain bread is baked as part of the bread programme. Nothing published addresses cross-contamination, so the weaker flag is the honest one.
• Operator: a two-venue chef-owner group with Tipo 00, rather than a rollout.
• Hygiene: Victoria publishes no venue ratings, only Safe Food Victoria's register of convictions under s.53D of the Food Act 1984, and this venue is not on it.5

Verdict

should-visit — Luke Skidmore and Andreas Papadakis opened this a shopfront from Tipo 00, the pasta bar people queue outside at half five on a Friday, and then largely declined to serve pasta. Larissa Dubecki's line is the whole review in one sentence: 'It's ironic to the power of ten that the dish that's become Ilaria's de facto signature is pasta.' The paccheri with prawns is what the city orders; what the kitchen would rather you took is the chargrilled whole octopus over nduja, the whole whiting or the roast chicken. Papadakis cooks here in an open kitchen rather than running a pass, and there is an enormous cellar under the floor holding wine and curing meat. Time Out still ranks it fourteenth among CBD restaurants and prices it at two of four, and the front high tables are kept back for walk-ins. Dubecki also files complaints, about a lamb tartare that collapses into one colour and about nasturtium leaves standing in for parsley, which is why the entry sits here rather than higher on a decade-old visit.