Neil Perry’s New Italian Restaurant Is a Quick, Swish Pivot from Song Bird

Beautiful. Fantastic. Phenomenal. Amazing.

These are the words Neil Perry is using to describe Australian produce. That produce is the reason the menu at Gran Torino – the quick-pivot Italian restaurant that just replaced Song Bird – is so long.

“I’m not really capable of going off in another direction,” Perry tells Broadsheet, “of doing anything but using the best produce, working with great suppliers, working with a great team and building a big menu.”

Gran Torino’s all about classics. Bellinis, Martinis and bitter vermouths, plus Campari and Aperol aplenty, run the drinks list. All of these are primed for snacks and small plates. Olives, of course (classic Sicilian greens, and some stuffed with veal and parmesan), then things like zesty artichoke and fennel salads, fritto misto di mare and prosciutto-topped gnocco fritto.

“It’s a bit like Margaret,” Perry says, of his ever-popular Bay Street dining room, and first solo venture. “The beautiful artichokes are really delicious so we’re making a caponata artichoke, using Elena [Swegen]’s phenomenal buffalo mozzarella – the only true buffalo mozzarella milked and made straightaway, up in the Hunter.”

There’s the “phenomenal” White Rock veal in the vitello tonnato, too, and a house-made bresaola using Mishima beef, served with great hunks of Parmigiano Reggiano.

A dedicated crudo list keeps it fresh, before the menu runs to house-made pastas: a tomatoey pici and a buttery veal agnolotti, then burnt butter pumpkin tortelli, squid-ink risotto and a classic bolognaise.

“The filled pastas are beautiful – the agnolotti, the plin, tortelli zucca. We really mature the pumpkins [for the tortelli], sun-dry them,” Perry says. “A lot of things go on that a lot of people don’t do because it’s quite time-consuming, but you just don’t get the depth of flavour out of them that we get.”

The reverence continues in a secondi menu that’s characterised by the chef’s signature elegance. Running the full gamut of Italian mains, it presents the possibility for a completely different dining experience every time you visit. “I can’t help myself. There’s such beautiful produce around, I can’t do four or five main courses. It drives me crazy.”

The Double Bay menu is of its place – Italian in a harbourside Sydney locale. “The pasta is just flour and water, Sardinian style, or Calabrian. Then there’s the plin, which has an extraordinary amount of egg yolks to make it soft and delicate and Piemonte.

“What we really try to do is reflect the authenticity of a dish. If we’re focusing on a particular region or dish, we don’t really try and bastardise it. But at the same time, people come to expect American Italian restaurants to be slightly different to Italian restaurants in Italy. We represent, first of all, Australian ingredients. Amazing Australian seafood, incredible Australian beef, beautiful White Rocks veal. And, of course, by doing that and putting on all this overturn of incredible Italian technique and the history of dishes, you come out somewhere that I think is uniquely Australian.”

In October last year, Perry told Broadsheet his Cantonese diner Song Bird was the most difficult project he’d ever done. A complete pivot, less than 12 months later, suggests it didn’t get much easier.

“It really is a situation where it just took me nine months to figure out exactly what needed to happen with this building to make it work properly,” Perry says. “I started off incorrectly and not in the right headspace, and now I think we’ve really honed it. Four floors, goods lifts, dumb waiters, you know – all that stuff had to be worked out.”

The pared-back Song Bird fit-out – with its marble, creamy walls, dark timber and velvet curtains – leant itself well to Gran Torino. Collette Dinnigan curated a lot – sourcing vintage pieces in Italy and choosing selects from Earl Carter’s black and white photos, now framed on the walls.

“I think the restaurant looks more Italian than it does Chinese,” Perry says. “We’ve got a great Italian team working with me at Margaret – it was all there ready to go. I had been thinking about it for a bit, I was under a lot of pressure, and I just thought, you know what, I’m going to go for it, because I really think that the opportunity is in it being Italian.”

Gran Torino
24 Bay Street, Double Bay
(02) 9871 9888

Hours:
Tue 6pm–11pm
Wed to Sat midday–3pm, 6pm–11pm
Sun midday–3pm, 6pm–10pm

themargaretfamily.com/venue/gran-torino
@grantorino.doublebay