If you’ve found yourself on Clarence Street at any point in the last decade, it’s probably because you were there for a peerless Margarita at Cantina OK. Or was it an Old Fashioned and a bottomless bowl of pretzels at The Baxter Inn? The point is, we’ve always hit that stretch between the QVB and Wynyard to drink. Not necessarily to eat.

But Palazzo Salato, a gorgeous new Italian restaurant by the Love Tilly Group, will surely change that in the decade to come.

Spanning 120 seats across a walk-in bar area, private dining room and restaurant proper, it’s a statement of ambition for Scott McComas-Williams, Matt Swieboda and Nathanial Hatwell, a crew known and loved for their flock of intimate, wine-centric venues.

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And without taking anything away from the namesake in Darlinghurst or pasta bars Ragazzi and Fabbrica a few streets over, it’s the group’s first “capital R” restaurant: as you take a seat beneath the heritage space’s soaring Victorian archways and watch a fleet of waitstaff glide around the room ferrying bottles of Barolo and plates of curly mafaldine bathing in uni butter, there’s no denying the ambition.

But group executive chef Scott McComas-Williams says taking over the two-storey building – previously home to seminal craft beer venue Redoak Boutique Beer Cafe – happened by accident.

“I’d walked past it so many times. We looked at a lot of sites, but we thought we’d have a look and just fell in love with the bones of the place, and the idea of what [interior architect Sarah Watt] could create. It’s so fucking cool.”

The bar and main dining area – which McComas-Williams estimates is roughly four times the size of Ragazzi – copped a future-classic facelift inspired by NYC dining institution, Gramercy Tavern, and the group’s favourite Roman trattorias. Curvaceous banquettes are decked out in tanned leather and gold velvet. Textured white walls are suggestive of meringue, and are punctuated by colourful framed artworks curated by Amy Finlayson (The Fin Collection) and custom silk printed pieces by Northern Rivers artist Lucia Canuto. A mural by Sydney artist Louis Wayling beautifies the bar.

A bigger venue means a bigger kitchen, and executive chef Alex Major (who’s moved up from Ragazzi) and head chef Vincenzo Romeo (ex-Casoni) have dedicated space to roll out labour-intensive stuffed pasta dishes such as scarpinocc with Andean sunrise potato, and agnolotti del plin with Wessex saddleback pork from Tathra Place. (“We’re starting with two but I’d like to bump that up to four,” says McComas-Williams). When Broadsheet visited, we also tried a casarecce with Boer goat ragu and pine nuts we could eat all day; and spaghetti alla chitarra spun with bottarga, which comes crowned with a raw egg yolk begging to be busted open.

But the team is also set to do more with proteins than ever before.

“Steaks, whole fish. We’ve got a rib eye going on this week. We’re looking forward to not just using pork to make sausages or ragu. We can now roast some of the beautiful pork and goat racks we get. It’s something I haven’t really been doing a lot of the last few years,” says McComas-Williams.

Wine underscores everything the Love Tilly group has done up until this point. Visit Dear Sainte Eloise for a celebration of French drops, or La Salut for a masterclass in Spanish varietals, fortifieds and vermouth. Jade Febvre and Julie Barbero (group sommelier and head sommelier, respectively) have curated a hefty wine list of around 600 bottles complete with wine maps of Italy’s top growing regions. But the list also crosses borders into France’s Jura and Beaujolais regions, and beyond.

But we can expect a few more of those Spanish bottles to be uncorked when the team unveils a new bar beneath the building later this year.

“I’m still in the conceptual phase but I’ve sort of designed a kitchen and bar in one long line. It’ll be akin to something you might see in Barcelona. It won’t be Italian as such,” says McComas-Williams.

Despite being the group’s biggest venue to date, it’s also been “the most pleasurable” according to McComas-Williams – thanks largely to the army of long-time collaborators involved.

“The food is something I’m super-duper excited about. But seeing this team create something beautiful here, that’s what’s really pumped me. It’s a whole other level.”

Palazzo Salato
201 Clarence Street, Sydney
(02) 9044 2556

Hours
Mon to Fri: 12pm–12am
Sat: 4pm–12am

palazzosalato.com