That's Caffe Sicilia. Located at 628 Crown Street Surry Hills, by it's sheer decor, Caffe Sicilia promises to transport you to the cobble-stone streets of any little local tratttoria in any piazza in Italia...that is, before you are met at the door by the 180kg+ Maori Maitre 'D...who looked ominously and suspiciously like a Security guard. Perhaps Caffe Sicilia's owners aren't taking any real-life Michael Corleone gunshot-to the-neck chances.
Pa Kettle was determined to eat here, after listening to rave reviews on talk-back radio. Stop right there. If a restaurant is having to advertise on talk-back radio to entice customers, we shouldn't be dining there. It wasn't a strong enough argument, and so Bopper, The Grifter, Pa Kettle and myself found ourselves here recently on a Saturday night.
The waitstaff are mostly Italian, and they tend to speak in Italian to you...or in an English so heavily accented that it may as well be Italian, because I understood just as much (or as little). There also seems to be A LOT of staff. We must have had around 5 waiters serving us through the course of the meal, and so it actually became quite obtrusive because not long after one waiter would have filled your water glass, another would come along and do the same thing. One waiter, dressed like a Doctor in a white coat, was clearly the man calling the shots. He seemed to have an authoritative air about him, and Pa Kettle commented he had a good sense of humor. Surprisingly, as 15 minutes earlier the same waiter had been explaining a free offering of mulberry and strawberry granita to the table, and when he walked away, I asked Pa Kettle what he had said because the waiter spoke directly to him, and he replied "I don't know, I couldn't understand him".
The food is quite reasonably priced, and I suspect this lies in the fact the place is licensed, and so one off-sets the other. Having said that, the wine list on a whole is horrendously expensive, some local Australian wines at least 3 times their comparative bottle-shop sale value. The imported Italian wines are worse.
The food is ho-hum. The Fritto Misto, and the special of Bacalao Cod Croquettes were probably the highlights of the meal. A selection of calamari, octopus, white bait and prawns lightly dusted in flour then fried and served with aioli and lemon. The croquettes served with a spiced tomato relish.
You do get a complementary dish of olives and bread rolls with olive oil and balsamic, which is a welcome touch. But no, that does not make up for bland pasta dishes, which quite frankly surprises me, as the restaurant uses Sophia Loren and her quip "everything you see, I owe to spaghetti" as a kind of ambassador. Um, maybe Sophia, but you certainly aren't eating it HERE. We ordered a selection of salumi and cheese ($33) which had prosciutto, salami, mortadella, bresaola and pancetta as well as parmesan, gorgonzola dolce, camembert, as well as muscatels, grissini and fig paste. You can't really go wrong with deli-cuts.
Next were Paste and Secondi. I ordered cavatelli pasta with slow cooked baby peas and meatballs ($20). I don't know why. I like peas. The meatballs were bland, bland, bland, although the pasta was cooked well. The Grifter ordered Maccheroni with rosemary and guanciale ($24). The pasta was most likely house-made but so dense and chewy, similar to the experience of eating licorice straps. The "sauce" was oil only, which made the pasta dry...the addition of rosemary was a sprig stuck in the middle of the bowl for presentation, almost like an apple in the mouth of a spit-roast pig. It cried out for the addition of acid to cut through the fattiness of the guanciale, and a sauce to dress the carbed-denseness of the pasta.
Bopper ordered the sirloin with salsa verde, potatoes and caremelised onions ($28). The salsa verde was a blend of parsley, basil and capers. It was super-bland, and looked like a cow's chewed cud. Bopper asked for medium rare...when it arrived the cow was still mooing on the plate. It seems (although not ironic) that the only person truly happy with his choice of meal was Pa Kettle, who ordered spatchcock braised with onion, carrot, potato and tomato ($24).
Caffe Sicilia...an experience no doubt. Although not to be repeated in a hurry.
RATING OUT OF 10: PRICE: 6/10 SERVING SIZE: 6/10
CRUNCH FACTOR: 5/10 SPICE: N/A
Apparently Gioia Cafe resides on a site which was once a petrol station. Interestingly, it still has that kind of drive-in feel - but more like Arnold's in Happy Days than a Caltex Star mart. It is a huge restaurant, and that kind of sucks in a way - because when it is nowhere near capacity i.e. your voice echoes when you are seated at your table, it is really kind of obvious this place is not a local favourite. We ordered the Italian standard - a pizza, a capriccosia salad, a gnocchi with gorgonzola sauce, and calamari fritti.
