First Look: The Famous Focaccia Makes It to Nina, the Suze Team’s New Northcote Pasta Restaurant

What do you call the iridescent slick left on a plate after the substantial parts have been devoured? Dregs? Too derogatory. Sauce? Not quite. Dressing? Closer, but still doesn’t capture the essential leftover-ness.

Whatever the answer, those little pools of flavour are what Nina is all about. You’re going to order a bunch of small plates – six, maybe. You’re going to eat the various contents, then spend roughly the same amount of time mopping up the glorious liquids with chunks of bronzed focaccia and making bass face.

The focaccia was a must-order when Steve Harry was head chef at Napier Quarter. Then he took it to Suze, the Fitzroy North wine bar he founded last year with front-of-house gun Giulia Giorgetti. Now it’s at Nina, an informal pasta restaurant the duo opens in Northcote today.

“For us, the whole entree and snack section is the focaccia and ‘What do you want with your focaccia?’” Harry confirms. “Almost none of these dishes make sense without it. You need it as a vehicle.”

The steak tartare juxtaposes virile beef with dainty white allium flowers. Finish it and you’re left with an intense puddle of garum, sherry vinegar, olive oil and a trace of fermented chilli. Focaccia time.

Take on the house-made ricotta with roasted red grapes, verjus (unripe grape juice) and vincotto (slow-cooked grape syrup) and you get a gothic mixture that’s simultaneously bright, fruity, dank and caramelised. Come back, focaccia.

A droopy roasted red pepper yields a lurid green emulsion of spinach and curry leaf, while cruciferous stalks of rainbow chard slow-braised in white soy, sherry vinegar and kelp sit in an actual dip: tahini, lemon juice, water. More focaccia, please, and never mind that it comes with its own plate of olive oil and house-made agrodolce.

With all this small plate action, it’s easy to forget Nina is a pasta restaurant with an extruder out the back. The kitchen is currently making the long ruffled ribbons known as mafaldine to pair with pistachio and spring veggies; casarecce for a white beef ragu; and maccheroni for a simple sugo. Buttoni (“buttons”) are filled with prawn and tarragon, and cacio e pepe agnolotti burst with manchego-infused bechamel.

Parents will have spied the distinctly kid-friendly options here – a key way the weeknight-coded Nina differs from Suze. This is reflected in the room, which feels more communal and utilitarian now than it did as Vex Dining just three months ago. Families will probably get around it.

Still, this is absolutely a place where you can have a grown-up drink or proper night out, courtesy of tap beers, classic cocktails and a single page listing cava, champagne and lambrusco alongside Clare Valley riesling, Yarra Valley pinot noir, Burgundy chardonnay and Piedmont nebbiolo. Shout-out, too, for the house’s burnt-citrus soda that drinks like a bitter aperitif. It’s one of the few non-alc liquids in the building that’s safe from marauding slices of focaccia.

Nina
66–68 High Street, Northcote
(03) 9820 3081

Hours
Tue to Fri 5pm–late
Sat 12pm–late

@nina.pastabar