Centenary Square, Church Street, Parramatta, Sydney. Meal for two, not including drinks and tip: $80
Australians are sophisticated when it comes to Italian food. We’ve known it for a long time. For most Australians who don’t have Italian heritage, it’s our default “foreign” cuisine, the first exotic thing many mothers learnt to cook in the 1960s (cooking Chinese food at home never really caught on back then). Even if you hate every food in the world except potatoes, if you’re Australian, you still eat Italian.
We’ve claimed Italian as ours and our standards are high. That’s why I wonder if we really need Jamie’s Italian … or rather another Jamie’s Italian.
Australia loves Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks, eats off his plates, stirs with Jamie’s spoons and can’t get enough of his TV shows – and it seems – his restaurants. His latest trattoria opened in Parramatta, western Sydney, on Monday – one of a group of eateries that have sprung up in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney.
The Parramatta location is an interesting choice. The area is undergoing a huge growth spurt, with a central business district that the Sydney Morning Herald says may well one day rival central Sydney. It’s a 45-minute drive from the Sydney CBD but is far closer to the geographic heart of Sydney than, say, the restaurant-heavy Potts Point, in the city’s east.
But Parramatta people are already spoilt for choice with food, having some of the city’s top Indian and Singaporean restaurants nearby. So will they take to Jamie’s?
I rang before our visit – it was the first day of opening – and was advised there might be queues. I braced myself for a long wait with a copy of Monday’s Media section of the Australian. But the mall outside Jamie’s was clear. There were plenty of empty tables. My newspaper went unread.
The restaurant didn’t have a first-day vibe to it. The spacious interior – industrial chic with hanging lightbulbs and exposed piping in the ceiling – looked lived in.
The staff were friendly and competent, showing no sign of first-day nerves. Perhaps they’d been bussed in from other “Jamie’s” around the country to ensure a smooth opening.
Yet, despite the on-trend fit-out (distressed wooden tables, open kitchen, colourful tins of Rylstone olive oil along the shelves) and the seamless service, there was something a bit 90s about Jamie’s Italian, something we had seen – and tasted – before.
Was it the Verve playing Sonnet as the background music, the focaccia for starters with olive oil and vinegar (the focaccia, by the way, was slightly dry and needed to be thoroughly oiled up), the spag bol for main and tomato bruschetta for entree? Or perhaps the dessert menu which included such 90s stalwarts as lemon cheesecake with lemon curd and a warmed chocolate brownie? The whole thing felt as familiar and comfortable as a rerun of Friends.
Yet all of this was (mostly) well done. The meatballs were a great excuse to order a second serving of bread: it would be a sin to leave any of that tomato sauce behind. The balls themselves were a tasty mince – not too overcooked – with a faint rosemary aftertaste. Less successful were the arancini balls, too starchy and flavourless to make much of an impression.
Our server recommended the truffle tagliatelle. It was fine. The truffle was the best bit – as thin and delicate as an autumn leaf whose morsels collided delightfully with the creamy, slippery texture of the fettuccine. But alas there was not enough truffle in the pasta (when is there ever enough?) and we were left with a pile of tagliatelle sloshing in butter, with nothing to counteract its slickness. Well, at least there was more bread.
Our favourite plate was the lamb and salumi spiedini. Served on a big skewer, the meat was a great accompaniment to the surrounding salad of tomato and mint. The lamb and mortadella were on the fatty side but full of flavour and more robust than our other choices.
My dining companion is a friend who lived in Trieste as a masters student and therefore knows a bit about real Italian food (although to be fair he reckons authentic Trieste food is of the central European variety – schnitzels and dumplings and baked meats). He reckons this Jamie’s is “Italian food for dummies”.
That’s not to say it’s bad. It’s not bad at all. It’s friendly and the servings are big, and there’s nothing too weird or cartilage-y on the menu. The staff are warm and the decor is trendy without being intimidating or edgy. We paid $80 for our food so it’s pretty good value (although we stuck to tap water and didn’t drink). It’s just that we’re no longer in the 90s and local diners probably could do better.
After all, in the new centre of the universe – western Sydney – there are great restaurants on every corner that could beat Jamie’s if not on price then at least on decade.
