"Tutti a tavola" means 'everyone to the table'. It's the essence of what Massimo Mele remembers from his happy childhood growing up in Hobart. It's also the name of the one-off dining experiences he curates at the Salt Meats Cheese warehouse every few months.
The long communal tables at Tutti a Tavola encourage diners to get to know one another.
"If you have Italian heritage, hearing the words 'tutti a tavola' means 'everyone to the table' for a big communal feast where there is lots of great food, the wine is flowing, everybody is sharing and laughing and having a great time," says the friendly, affable 30-something.
Two Italian boys - Massimo Mele and Stefano Di Blasi share a love of good honest Italian food.
It's clear from the outset that Mele and Salt Meats Cheese co-director Stefano Di Blasi love orchestrating these social occasions in the 950 square metre larder. And, from a diner's perspective, part of the appeal is the theatre of watching Mele himself tacking in and around the tables, cooking, orchestrating the staff and greeting his customers as if they are family.
Guests are given a Sofi Spritz on arrival at Salt Meats Cheese.
At the recent Roman edition of Tutti a Tavola, there were diners present who have attended every one of Mele's Sydney events. "Tutti a Tavola is a fantastic excuse for me to celebrate great regional Italian street food. These big communal feasts are so much fun and the feedback is that it inspires people to make feasting with their own family more of a tradition," he says.
Communal tables are at the core of the Tutti a Tavola concept at Salt Meats Cheese. Photo: Saskia Mulder.
Last week, the La Scala on Jersey executive chef and owner of Catering by Massimo once again commandeered the interior of the Alexandria food emporium for a feast of epic proportions. Like the space itself, there's a refreshing unpretentiousness to the compact fixed price menu. Pair this with a convivial commotion, musicians belting out traditional Italian tunes and you have an event that is intimate, informal, relaxed and friendly.
"There are no name tags on the tables, so it's very informal and about bringing people together and having fun."
Tutti A Tavola is such a warm, intimate experience that diners arrive as strangers and leave as friends.
This month's four-course menu, which was served with wine and beer, followed a Roman Street Food theme. The feast featured time-tested recipes served on three long tables designed to replicate the colour and organised chaos of an Italian feast. Although the first event featured a table set for 40, Tutti a Tavola has, like a good Italian family, doubled in size since the first offing four years ago.
Antipasti platters to share include woodfired pizza with potatoes, garlic and rosemary, proscuitto and pickled vegetables.
Forget dainty morsels or fancy foams. Modelled on a classic Italian lunch, this pop-up on peptides began with shared plates of antipasti to pick at - house-made pizza with potatoes, garlic and rosemary, curls of prosciutto and salami, pickled carrots and Asiago cheese - baked semolina gnocchi with pecorino cheese, veal saltimbocca with crispy sage and pancetta and fresh calamari fritti with lemon and rocket.
The woodfired oven at Salt Meats Cheese sees a bit of action at the Tutti a Tavola event.
The feast also included a 20kg shoulder of lamb cooked in Salt Meats Cheese's new wood-fired oven (dubbed The Pizza Box), a whopping 10kg of strozzapretti pasta with a rich, tender oxtail and celery ragu cooked in an oversized paella pan in front of the guests; and an avalanche of salad leaves. Sweet tooths were also sated with rum baba for dessert.
Fresh circles of tender calamari fritti served with lemon and rocket. Photo: Saskia Mulder.
"These events are about my idea of Italy. It's about people coming and sharing plates with strangers and leaving as friends. There are no nametags on the table, so it's very informal and about bringing people together and having fun," he says.
Meltingly tender woodfired lamb shoulder with artichoke, egg and peas was a standout dish.
Joining us at our communal table is a friendly couple from the Central Coast, two Italian-Australian sisters who live in Haberfield, a gaggle of women who have attended all of Mele's feasts and a couple celebrating their anniversary.
Strozzapretti with oxtail and celery ragu is sinfully good.
Mele has flirted with the pop-ups since 2011, when, as then executive chef of the Hugo's Group, he hosted the first Tutti a Tavola at Hugo's in King's Cross. But Mele says he feels like he has found his home at Salt Meats Cheese, a faff-free industrial space that makes for a very relaxed dining experience. As the 80 or so guests arrive, he greets each and every diner as if they were family, and looks genuinely pleased to see so many of his regular, loyal customers.
Massimo Mele says he feels like Tutti a Tavola has found its home at Salt Meats Cheese.
With his straw-blonde hair, eyes the colour of galvanized steel and accent he describes "as ocker as it gets", Mele says he doesn't fit many people's image of someone with southern Italian heritage. But the chef, who spent the first six years of his life living in Naples, says he identifies strongly with his Italian heritage and the regional cuisine he grew up with.
The Pizza Box woodfired oven comes into play during the Tutti a Tavola event.
"When I go home to Hobart, I close the front gate to my parent's house and step inside my family home and it's like being back in Italy. My parents speak Italian and they have never let go of the culture. The food I cook is as traditional as possible, but it's also my version of the food I've grown up with," says Mele, who spent his formative years working in his parent's restaurant, La Bella Napoli.
The dish of the day: the wood-fired lamb shoulder with artichoke, egg and peas
The sturdy Salt Meats Cheese warehouse is the perfect backdrop to Mele's feast, where each dish is delivered tableside and designed to share. Seeing Mele, tea towel draped over one shoulder, giving serious attention and care to the food as it goes out also makes you feel even more connected to the chef and the kitchen.
Even a simple salad is treated with great respect and seasoned just so.
The Salt Meats Cheese warehouse is the perfect backdrop to Mele's feast.
"When you are cooking in front of people around a shared table, it's very intimate. It's for people hungering for proper Italian food, who want to chat in a relaxed, friendly environment and enjoy food made to share," he says.
Rum babas all round wrap up this Roman feasts of epic proportions.
The fact that the feast is something a team of nonnas might knock up at home on a special occasion Sunday means it is good honest seasonal food treated with the respect. That's reason enough to encourage 'everyone to the table' at Tutti a Tavola. Mangia, mangia.
The Grounds of Alexandria shone a light on the potential of the inner south.
A few years ago, right before Salt Meats Cheese opened to the public, I happened to be there, on the scene, following my nose, which is notoriously good at sniffing out exciting places to eat, shop and drink. I'd been at The Grounds of Alexandria for an interview I was conducting for Good Food and shared the publication's enthusiasm for the area that has gone from strength to strength since I worked down the road at delicious. magazine a decade ago, when the lovely French bistro Bitton was one of the only inspired options in the area.
The big formaggios at Salt Meats Cheese, Edoardo Perlo and Stefano de Blasi.
What's
in a name? After
wrapping up my interview at The Grounds, I walked into the adjacent car park, where I noticed
a sign for Casa Gusto plastered along the side of a giant warehouse in Bourke
St. The vintage-inspired branding intrigued me, so I popped my head in. What I
didn't realise at the time was that the runaway success of The Grounds of
Alexandria would soon be bolstered by the arrival of these two Italian boys,
cousins Edoardo Perlo and Stefano de Blasi. I've decided to feature Salt Meats Cheese because it's one of the places I love to go to stock up on gourmet goods. Edoardo and Stefano are authentic and charming and I believe their energy and enthusiasm has helped give the 2015 postcode the edge as a lively, sophisticated community hub.
The Grounds of Alexandria has swelled to include a garden, courtyard and eatery bar.
Grounds for inspiration
Grounds for approval It's now a few years since the outlet opened and I've become a regular in the area, dedicating a day or two a month to whizzing into the inner south to stock up on fresh fruit and vegetables at Eveleigh Market, on Saturday mornings, buying bread and coffee beans from The Grounds and bagging a swag of groceries from Salt Meats Cheese, formerly known as Casa Gusto (the name of Stefano's family food import business in Italy).
As The Grounds has swelled to include The Potting Shed, a garden, coffee roastery and courtyard replete with clucking chooks and fat pigs, SMC has simultaneously settled into its prime position really well. It's a symbiotic thing between the two spaces.
These days, Stefano and Edoardo refer to me as Carla Columbus, as they claim I was the first food writer in Australia to discover them. I'll take that. Like the two cousins, I nail my colours to both the Australian and Italian flags and love the fact the fellas offer old-school deli service my late nonno would have appreciated with gourmet offerings that would appeal to my hip cousins from Milano.
The Grounds of Alexandria got the ball rolling in the inner south behind places such as Bitton.
Salt Meats Cheese has morphed from selling dry goods into offering pizza, panino and pasta.
Pizza, panino, pasta and granita On my last visit to the warehouse, I was met by one of the young Italian staffers who ushered me in to perve on the brand-new pasta bar and open kitchen serving pizza and panino. With Sinatra crooning in the background, I was also nudged toward the lovely Salvatore Luigi de Luca, at Cremeria de Luca's pop-up granita counter and urged to try a refreshing lime granita.
Salvatore de Luca manning the pop-up granita stand at Salt Meats Cheese over summer.
Salt Meats Cheese is like Madonna, the mistress of reinvention.
Meat packing district The providore also encourages genuflection at that cathedral of cured meats that is the Galeria de Jamon and a walk down the aisles to choose from a carefully curated selection of gourmet dry goods - from bonfire smoked sea salt to squid ink linguini and a range of quality Australian extra virgin olive oil, flavoured salts and specialty grains.
The cathedral to cured meats that is the Galeria de Jamon.
Midweek meals made easy As a busy working mum, what also takes my fancy are the meals that help me through the mid-week hump, when I'm juggling deadlines and parenting duties: three pizza bases for $10, which I whip out when I have a house full of hungry boys, as well as a selection of Sicilian olives, hot sauces, proscuitto and cheeses to make entertaining easy. I appreciate that SMC is a one-stop shop, stocking ingredients with accents ranging from Italian to Asian.
These Salt Meats Cheese pizza bases are perfect for whipping out to feed the hungry hordes.
The extended remix of Salt Meats Cheese includes an eatery and pasta, pizza and panino bar. Oh and turduckens, too.
Alexandria ripe for changeWaterloo and Alexandria are both part of the Green Square Village – the City’s highest growth area – and home to 14,802 people. By 2030 the population’s expected to rise to 48,848 residents, a 230 per cent increase thanks to the $8 billion Green Square development.
City historian Lisa Murray lives on the fringes of Waterloo, in Redfern, which has also sprouted a swathe of sophisticated new spaces. “As an historian, I’m interested in the past, which is reflected in the changes that are happening in this area today,” Murray says. "The reasons these areas are popular today are the same reasons they were popular when the colonists came here in the 19th century: they are on the fringes of the city, but still far enough away to enjoy an interesting lifestyle. This area used to be wetlands, which in turn attracted industries and, up until the early 20th century, it was a pretty smelly place to live. It has only been the last few decades that the area has started to become a destination in its own right,” she says.
The Grounds has helped transform the inner-south suburb into Alexandria the Great.
Deck the aisles with panettone, fah-la-la-la-lah, la-la-la-la.
The inner-south a corridor of growth “Cities can never be preserved. Sydney is a dynamic place that is constantly shifting and changing and these industrial-era areas reflect that. There are more and more cafes and art galleries opening up and little boutiques and that has created momentum. That’s how gentrification works: it’s never about a suburb staying insular,” she says.
Murray says as well as connecting the community with the history of suburbs such as Waterloo and Alexandria, her role as an historian is to help develop its future. While this once blue-collar area now attracts it's fair share of well-heeled comers, keen home cooks and A-list chefs, the wholesale prices on the gourmet food items also makes the place accessible for those on a budget. The fact that I can buy quality food items in bulk is reason enough to make the 30-minute drive from Cronulla to Alexandria. Note: lucky locals now have access to the pizza home delivery service on Friday and Saturday nights.
Welcome to panini paradise ... at Salt Meats Cheese.
Like many of the SMC mafia, I appreciate the fact the outlet is not too lah-de-da and, with its cooking classes, food festivals and special events, is a bit of a lifestyle enhancer, mounting a convincing argument for living on the fringes of the city.
Take your cue from the queues at the SMC pasta bar.
Salt Meats Cheese, The Potting Shed and The Grounds of Alexandria are all located on Bourke Rd, Alexandria, NSW. Phone: + 61 2 9690 2406. www.saltmeatscheese.com.au
