Grilled swordfish resting on eggplant lasagne
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221 Queen Street, Melbourne, 9670 8488
My score: 4/5
There are some certainties at Caterina’s, a 20-year-old business lunch hub in a blessedly old-fashioned basement. You can count on owner Caterina Borsato being there, seeing all, reading the room, delivering each diner the experience they are there for. That might be a quick sanity break and bowl of pasta on a trying day, a deal-making lunch in a quiet corner shielded by a serious bottle of red, or a golden handshake shakedown that will likely extend to dinnertime.
You can bet there’ll be more men than women and that they’ll be superintended by female Italian waiters. You can be sure that the collection of empty magnums (big wine bottles) and jeroboams (even bigger bottles) will grow every week, and that these walls could spill a few tales. Most of all, you can be sure that you’ll have a good time.
The food is Italian, deft and heartfelt, leaning to the Veneto but not slavishly so, and featuring produce grown by Caterina’s mother in Gippsland. Chef Jerry Kim has cooked Italian his whole career. A light touch is evident in dishes like the vitello tonnato, a restrained rendition of the classic veal and tuna entree. Kim’s girello is seared then steamed rather than poached, so the meat is flavourful and moist, and merely dabbed with tuna mayonnaise. A chocolate budino – pudding thickened with biscuits – is glossy, smooth and more or less faithful to Caterina’s nonna’s recipe.
The menu is hefty but the specials are where the action is. One of the most enjoyable certainties at Caterina’s is that your waiter will recite the dishes of the day by heart, a performance which takes some minutes and includes – I don’t know – a dozen dishes of varying complexity, an intoxicating swirl of ‘tortelli’ and ‘risotto’ and ‘fried capers’ and before you know it you don’t know whether to applaud or cry or order one of everything and simply move in.
Tortelli pasta, tinged with beetroot, stuffed with sea bass, is tossed with delicate but rounded fish stock and sweet scallops. There’s always braised meat (we lucked onto goat, which fell stickily from the bone into creamy polenta) and game fish (swordfish, grilled pink, resting on eggplant lasagne). It’s good stuff, cooked well, with care. There’s technique aplenty if you care to notice it, but if you’d rather focus on table talk, neither food nor waitstaff will interrupt with grandstanding flourishes.
The final certainty is that you’ll stay longer than anticipated. Sipping a macchiato, eating petit fours I couldn’t possibly fit in, I puzzled over the fact that it seemed to be school pick-up time just minutes after 1pm. That’s not just wine, that’s hospitality. Caterina’s makes a persuasive case that long lunches are a must, even if they can’t be expensed, and should be rostered into every eater’s life.
See their website.
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First published in The Age, February 28th, 2016.
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