Miss Bar Vincent? This old-school hatted Italian might be what you’re looking for

Smooth place, this. Tabletop candles are lit the instant you sit down; a drinks list is presented and water is poured. Negroni orders are promptly taken; staff will tell you as much or as little about every dish as you care to ask. No, I’m not recognised. No one here knows I write this column. Trattoria Da Orazio is just one of those well-calibrated restaurants run by people who want nothing more than for you to eat well and listen to energetic Italian crooning on the stereo. Small wonder it’s packed on a Wednesday night.

If you recognise the name, yes, it’s that Orazio – Orazio D’Elia – who has been serving pretty good pizza and tremendous porchetta to families at Da Orazio in Bondi for years. His Rushcutters Bay trattoria opened in July, and it’s where the Campania-born bloke wants to remind Sydneysiders that he’s good for more than blistered margherita crusts and rolled pig. D’Elia was actually head chef at the same McLachlan Avenue site 14 years ago, when it was the widely adored Popolo. (More recently, Marta operated here, until it didn’t.) Smaller plates are split across “cured”, “aged”, “preserved” and “antipasti”, building up to five pastas and some plus-sized mains.

Your choice of “cured” could be smoked speck; “aged” is tomino cheese served on the paper it’s baked in and teamed with sweet-sour caponatina to cut through the ooze; for “preserved”, roasted red peppers are sliced to the size of a big toe and stuffed with a tuna mousse of forthright ocean flavour.

Crumbed and fried Puglian bombette (“little bombs”) are dense with slow-cooked pork neck and provolone cheese, and more than two of them will ruin you for anything else besides the leaf salad. A flaky-crusted take on tiella di Gaeta – a seafood pie from Lazio – is rich and salty with octopus, olives and capers. Tortelli Milanesi are filled with braised osso buco and sit pretty in a saffron cream sauce. It’s a delicious, albeit heavy, pasta that will absolutely require sharing, or at least something crisp and fresh from the impressive Italian-forward wine list.

The menu roams across Italy like this, pulling multiple regional threads if you want to travel to Naples by way of spaghetti with bright passata, or Florence with ricotta-filled cannelloni. But I suspect most of the diners – who look like the same semi-retired set that used Darlinghurst’s Bar Vincent as a second home until the new owners introduced online reservations and bottled cocktails – are just happy to have somewhere they can call to book and eat a nice steak. Somewhere with soft lighting, handsome timber-lined walls, and a decent Chianti for $20 a glass.

That steak could be Brooklyn Valley pasture-raised tenderloin with green peppercorn sauce, or a 400-gram scotch fillet drizzled with very good olive oil.

Meanwhile, veal rib-eye scallopini is appropriately tender and lemon-sharp, and brandy-flamed king prawns slip easily from their shells if you want to get a bit of surf-and-turf action happening.

The only flubbed notes come from a dessert stand loaded with eight assorted pastries baked at Da Orazio Pasticceria in Alexandria, which are past their prime by 9pm. But this is hardly a reason to never return, especially when the maritozzi buns are likely in top form every Sunday lunch, when D’Elia celebrates the weekend by slow cooking a regionally specific ragu. Welcome back to the neighbourhood, chef.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.