The Best Restaurants in Melbourne’s Little Italy Are on Opposite Sides of the Street
MELBOURNE, Australia — The Olive Jar and Capitano have a lot in common. Both restaurants are in Carlton, Melbourne’s historically Italian neighborhood. They sit about a block from each other on Rathdowne Street, not far from Carlton’s touristy main drag, Lygon Street, the center of Melbourne’s Little Italy. They both serve pizza, pasta and wine.
The Olive Jar is a product of old Carlton; Capitano is part of Carlton’s renaissance — a new restaurant that aims to pay respect to the neighborhood’s history while modernizing its tastes and aspirations. Both are as Melbourne as Melbourne can be, but they exist in almost entirely separate worlds.
The Olive Jar isn’t particularly well known. For 30 years it was called La Contadina — it became the Olive Jar in 2014 but retained the same ownership. Away from the bustle of Lygon, it has never succumbed to the whims of single-visit customers who are there thanks to a guidebook, so it retains its family-restaurant status. Upon entering, you’ll see examples of fresh housemade pasta draped over a display on the front counter, along with a huge platter of antipasti.
Specials are noted on a chalkboard in the dining room, the brick walls decorated with photos, posters and tchotchkes, including pots and pans with handwritten signs that say they were brought from Italy by “Nonna.”
The restaurant is quiet on weeknights, when you can find the owner, Giovanni Mico, standing languidly behind the bar, occasionally answering the phone or disappearing into the back to retrieve an order for a guest at the door. Most of the midweek business is generated by the restaurant’s $10 pizza or pasta takeout special. But on Friday and Saturday nights, things get wild.
On weekends, large multigenerational groups come in to celebrate at long tables, and couples come to dine over candlelight. These are also the nights when Mr. Mico sings.
Singing is perhaps too simple an explanation for what he does. He serenades. He flirts. He performs. (He has the languid charm of your youngest Italian uncle; the term silver fox comes to mind.) Wine and limoncello flow, mostly from unlabeled bottles produced — so the story goes — by Grandpa, the family patriarch.
When Mr. Mico sings “My Way,” he does so in a thick Italian accent, but the last word of the phrase “I chewed it and spit it out,” is pronounced with a deeply Australian inflection: “aaowt.” On the right night, with enough of Grandpa’s wine and Mr. Mico in the midst of a particularly rousing rendition of “That’s Amore,” the Olive Jar is my favorite restaurant in this city, this country or maybe the world.
The Olive Jar is a wonderful, unadulterated example of historical Carlton and Italy as seen through the lens of Australia. Like Italian-Americans, Italian-Australians have their own dishes and sayings and way of life, one that’s profoundly reverential of the old country and grateful for the bounty of this country.
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The fish on the specials menu will likely be barramundi. My favorite pasta is topped with a staple of these classic restaurants — a hot-and-spicy red sauce with salami, olives and copious amounts of fiery crushed red pepper.
The restaurant is also, in some ways, part of a dying breed. In recent decades, many food-obsessed Melburnians have turned away from classic Italian-Australian restaurants, derided for not serving “real Italian food.” While many generally complain about the tourist trappings of Lygon Street, the disdain extends to anything that might be called Italian-Australian rather than modern or regional Italian.
The local version of the red-sauce joint gets no respect, even if the pasta is made on site and a guy sings to you while you eat.
When I first returned to Melbourne, I was worried that Carlton might slowly lose its Italian soul. Newer restaurants tended toward modern Australian small plates and away from pizza and pasta. The Lygon Street Food Store, a cafe and deli that opened in 1952, closed without much fanfare in October. Other longtime neighborhood stalwarts closed and sold to young restaurateurs known more for rock ‘n’ roll attitudes than classic sensibilities.
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That is almost the story of Capitano. Opened in August by a group of young restaurant industry darlings in a former pub, it is part of a small but vibrant movement that embraces the neighborhood’s Italian history.
The chef Casey Wall and the sommelier Banjo Harris Plane (formerly of Attica) are best known for Bar Liberty in nearby Fitzroy, which has been an important part of Melbourne’s casual, wine-focused new wave. Mr. Wall, originally from North Carolina, has also gained a following for his Southern cooking at Rockwell and Sons in Collingwood. Instead of American- or world-influenced modern Australian food and wine, Capitano is home to pizza, pasta and a list of fascinating Italian wines.
Mr. Wall, along with the head chef, Blake Giblet, has achieved something admirable and rare here, which is to create an instantly classic dish in Capitano’s veal parmigiana. The parma is a staple of Australian pub food and one of the great triumphs of Italian-Australian cookery.
In pub form, it’s usually made with chicken or eggplant, but Capitano uses veal on the bone, which has been pounded out to the size of a vinyl LP, breaded and pan-fried, then covered in rich red sauce, globs of melted mozzarella and a flurry of fresh basil. It costs $65, can easily feed two or three people and is utterly spectacular: crisp edges, melty cheese, tangy sauce, meaty wonder.
This and other elements of Capitano could be described as modern nostalgia — loving nods to the past imbued with much of what’s great about eating and drinking in the present. The Negroni has a subtle kick of high-quality saffron lurking in its bittersweet, boozy depths; the martini is made with olive oil-infused gin and olive-leaf bitters.
I have always taken issue with oversalting in some of the food at Bar Liberty, and the same is true at Capitano. Chittara with clam sauce would have been lovely had it been edible. The same was almost true of the meatballs. But the pizzas are charred and stretchy in all the right ways, and that veal parma is salted just right.
This old-meets-new Carlton aesthetic is growing: Last year, the longstanding restaurant Da Salvatore Pizza by the Metre closed, reopening in November as Leonardo’s Pizza Palace under the direction of another group of well-known young restaurateurs. The new owners kept many of the visual elements of Da Salvatore — several of the original photos still hang on the wall — and the place retains the feel of a 1960s or ‘70s pizza joint. Leonardo’s and Capitano also share some foreign aspirations: Both serve purportedly American-style pepperoni pizzas, and Leonardo’s even provides a side of ranch dressing for crust-dipping. (Still, ranch should not taste predominantly like mayonnaise.)
I’d prefer that these places lean in to the Italian-Australian roots of the area rather than reach for America. I’ve clambered onto this soapbox before, but we ought to be more appreciative of the food culture that is our own.
If anyone needs any more proof of that, they need only book a table at the Olive Jar.
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The Olive Jar
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