From arancini to tiramisu, the family-run Donnini’s has been serving gold standards of Italian classics since 1979.
15/20
Italian$$
Wind back to the 1960s and Lygon Street, Carlton, was one of the only places in Melbourne you could drink espresso and buy parmesan cheese. By the 1980s, the strip was synonymous with Italian food and the Lygon Street Festa drew crowds of 700,000.
Those days are gone: today you’re as likely to find Pakistani kebabs as pizza capricciosa, and if you want gelato, you’ll find Asian flavours like pandan alongside the pistachio. There’s delight in change, but heritage hold-outs should be celebrated, too.
That’s where Donnini’s comes in, not because it’s been offering the same food since 2002, but because it’s still doing it so well, with rigour and passion.
The setting is simple, worn by loving use, with bare tables, functional servingware and paper napkins, whether you’re inside the long dining room or at one of the broad pavement tables where awnings and glass partitions more or less keep the weather at bay.
The configuration is flexible – a table pulled here or pushed there – speaking to the way the restaurant serves its guests, most of whom are regulars who’ve accumulated friends, kids and grandkids along the way.
Owner-brothers Riccardo and Marco Donnini are from a restaurant dynasty. Their grandparents came from Italy in the 1950s to open University Cafe, which is opposite and displays one of the city’s first espresso machines. (In those days, baristas needed a boilermaker’s licence to operate the mysterious, hissing contraptions.)
Between 1979 and 2002, the family ran Donnini’s on nearby Drummond Street before relaunching on the main drag. Head chef Vito DeNino has been with the family since the 1980s. Maria Briscuso, 80, has been hand-making pasta for the Donninis for decades. Manager Vik Gill has run the dining room for 16 years. One Donnini is in the house at all times, unless the Blues are playing.
You’ll eat cucina povera, peasant cuisine that depends on touch, skill, season, region and a fierce and necessary attachment to frugality. It’s not flashy and it doesn’t pop on Instagram, but the ingredients are first-rate and the dishes hit you in the soul.
The team makes three different bread doughs. There’s lightly leavened focaccia, a piadina pressed into an outstanding vitello tonnato toastie (a lunch winner) and Tuscan covaccino, which is laced with pork fat, rolled thinly, scattered with asiago cheese, and cooked hard and fast before it’s draped with prosciutto. It’s crisp and melty, pure and simple bliss.
Most tables order the trio of pasta. Gnocchi with tomato and basil, spinach and ricotta tortelli with mascarpone, and tagliatelle with bolognese ragu shimmer like the Three Graces – radiant, joyful and glorious.
Somehow, you also need to try the spaghetti carbonara. Pork jowl is cured in-house for eight weeks, bringing concentrated, salty ballast to a sublime emulsification of butter, egg yolk and parmigiano. It’s the gold standard for a much-abused classic.
Arancini are often stodgy rice spheres but here, they’re only just held together by starch and love and filled with something seasonal, maybe asparagus or mushroom, plus oozy mozzarella.
Tiramisu, recently trending, is now considered déclassé in some quarters. Whatever. The whole time, Donnini’s has been serving a version from great-grandmother Eros that’s built in a cup and soaked in espresso with a splash of marsala; not too biscuity, everything in balance.
Fashions flow, streets change but bless the restaurants that ignore it all, greeting each customer as a fond friend who’s ready to swoon over pasta.
The low-down
Atmosphere: Honest, family-run Italian
Go-to dishes: Pasta trio ($41.90-$51.90); Covaccino ($18.90); Arancini ($21.90 for 3)
Drinks: The concise food-friendly wine list leans to northern Italy. There’s decent value, with many bottles hovering either side of $60 and nine wines by the glass ($15-$17)
Cost: About $150 for 2 people, excluding drinks
This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine
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