‘I want to treat Australia as a region of Italy’: This reborn North Melbourne restaurant is only getting started

North Melbourne’s Sosta Cucina, a well-loved northside address for 16 years, has been reborn as Sosta Ristorante: still Italian, still for locals, but with a fresher look and menu thanks to a new set of hands.

Overlapping circles of friends brought together Sosta’s original owner, Maurice Santucci, with the restaurant’s new partners: chef Alex Tintori and front-of-house manager Roby Giannetta, both from Il Bacaro on Little Collins Street, and Frank Remoundos, a businessman who dined at Sosta regularly.

“I spent a lot of time at Sosta as a customer and made great memories there, hanging out [with friends] back in the day. It was always a special place for us,” Remoundos says.

Santucci, a former chef at The Grand in Richmond, opened the restaurant in 2007, at the same time moving from the kitchen to front-of-house. The pitch was unfussy Italian food (mostly northern) delivered in a smartly dressed monochromatic room with dark ceilings, white walls and timber panels.

“The idea was to keep it simple, like The European or [Cafe] Di Stasio, a stalwart where people could be comfortable [to] make it an occasion or just come in and have a ragu and a glass of vino,” says Santucci.

When it opened, nothing on the menu cost more than $30 and there were no tablecloths. It soon became a restaurant Melburnians, especially locals, kept on high rotation.

“I feel like it’s part of me and the neighbourhood,” Santucci says now. “Sosta has been there longer than my son’s been alive.”

But after becoming the sole owner and surviving the pandemic years, he was tired. Hearing that Tintori, Giannetta and Remoundos were looking to open their own restaurant, it was the ideal scenario. He could place the business in trusted hands.

Sosta Ristorante is a maiden voyage for all three new owners. “The only time I’ve been involved with restaurants is when I go and sit down and eat,” says Remoundos.

While it’s Tintori and Giannetta’s first business, each brings more than a decade of experience from Australia and overseas, with the pair meeting at the hatted Il Bacaro in the city. At their first venue, they wanted to intertwine a worldly outlook with their Italian upbringing, where local is king when it comes to food.

“I want to try and treat Australia as a region of Italy,” says Tintori.

Davidson’s plum is the star of a crostata tart, mountain pepper lifts nettle gnocchi, and the cotoletta is not veal but swordfish from Mooloolaba.

Regulars kept asking Tintori to keep Sosta’s cotoletta, so he decided to do a local version of the crumbed veal dish hailing from Milan and finish it with caperberries, caper leaves, Mount Zero green olives, the native plant karkalla and puttanesca sauce.

“It’s a bit of experimenting but, at the same time, I feel like I’m respecting Italian food more by using the local produce, not importing it from Italy,” he says.

More traditional terrain is covered by grilled calamari with broad beans and capers, burrata with fresh peas and wild garlic flowers, and cappelletti pasta with beef ragu. Gianetta’s wine list also skews heavily Italian, but cocktails showcase native Australian liqueurs and locally made spirits.

The interiors will feel familiar to Sosta’s regulars. The contrasting walls and ceilings remain, but the bar sports a new olive-green front and the walls are hung with contemporary paintings and posters rather than family photos.

Remoundos is learning quickly that restaurants never sleep.

“It’s a work in progress. For example, tomorrow I’ll be there all day, putting pictures up on the wall,” he says.

Santucci, meanwhile, is looking forward to working for someone else for a change.

Open Wed-Fri noon-3pm Tue-Sat 6pm-10.30pm

12 Errol Street, North Melbourne, 03 9329 2882, sosta.com.au