Now Open: Lulu’s Cantina, the Panini-Slinging Neighbour to Perth’s Favourite Pasta Spot

Coppa. Provolone. Pickled capsicum. All of it is crammed between slipper-sized slabs of ciabatta – the kind of sandwich that stains your fingers with oil and vinegar and doesn’t apologise for it. “That’s the Tony Soprano special,” chef-patron Joel Valvasori tells Broadsheet. “It’s the only roll he ever orders on the show.” The chef would know: Valvasori has watched The Sopranos end-to-end eight times. The panino is his ode to gabagool and the grab-your-gut appetite of America’s most famous fictional mob boss.

It’s one of several reasons to slide onto a stool at Lulu’s Cantina, a small, walk-ins-only annex next door to Lulu La Delizia, the Subiaco osteria that’s been drawing loyal pasta fans (including Nigella Lawson) since 2016.

But this isn’t an overflow room or an afterthought. “It obviously needs to stand on its own two feet,” says Valvasori. And it does, confidently. The space – concrete, curves, dark timber, some graffiti-inspired art painted by Valvasori himself – has the cool restraint of a brutalist sculpture. But it hums with the soft pleasures of good bread, good cheese, and good drinks.

The cantina opens from midday and settles into its groove as the day rolls on. Lunch might look like tuna crudo dressed with macerated lemon and capers, a bitter endive salad spiked with gorgonzola, or a rotating line-up of panini including Lulu’s famous meatballs pressed into a roll, and a pork-and-fennel sausage with provolone and cime di rapa.

In the evening, it edges into wine bar territory. A daily pasta special and those meatballs – now served with soft polenta and grated parmigiano – emerge from the osteria next door. Aperitivo options rotate regularly: perhaps baccalà crostini one day, maybe smoked and honeyed nuts, olives, pickled peppers or potato chips on another. “They’re just great things to nibble on with a drink before dinner,” says Valvasori. It’s loose and free-flowing, like a good cantina should be.

There’s a little kitchen behind the counter, just big enough for slicing salumi, plating cheese and letting the butter come to room temperature – which matters when said butter is blitzed with Cantabrian anchovies, wild Sicilian oregano, lemon and garlic, then slathered over fried bread. “Our version of garlic bread,” says Valvasori. “It makes the room smell amazing.”

There’s joy in the details: the selection of Italian cheeses includes a gorgonzola piccante, ubriaco prosecco, and a testun al barolo – a Piedmontese cheese aged in nebbiolo grape must that’s creamy and crumbly at the same time.

The wine list is small, snappy, and less rigid than its sibling’s. There’s a Margaret River chardonnay, an Australian pinot noir – “we’ve never had those at Lulu’s” – and, for the first time, a Martini.

Still, the cantina moves at its own tempo. “It doesn’t need to be full all the time,” Valvasori says. “We just want people rolling through – some for coffee, some for a panino at lunch, or a drink before dinner. It’s for people to use in their own way.”

Lulu’s Cantina
Next door to Lulu La Delizia
5/97 Rokeby Road, Subiaco
(08) 9381 2466

Hours:
Tues to Fri midday–8pm
Sat 4pm–9pm

@lululadelizia