Osteria Oggi

Hold the bread and veg, please.

Raddy (alt: Adelaide) is what I would call an ideal long weekend break.  Especially when you live in Melbourne, as I do, which on most days feels very far away from the rest of the world*.  World’s most liveable city, sure, but I’m a great believer in the benefits of a change of scenery.

To make a long story short: S up and moved to Raddy with her beautiful family some time after COVID (during COVID?  Look, that whole era is all a bit of blur honestly).  A true Melburnian at heart, she came back to throw her fabulous fortieth in Richmond at which point I convinced L to make a weekend trip to see her in her new surrounds.

We got off the plane at a perfect time for lunch (made all the more perfect by our pre-flight mimosas).  There’s nothing quite like a glass of bubbly to start a holiday… and we all know the societal concept of time pauses at an airport, right?.

One of the great things about Raddy is just how close everything is.  A twentyish minute Uber ride took us directly to Osteria Oggi, a recommendation from a friend of a friend of L’s.  It was a Friday and we didn’t have a booking, but hey - it was probably quite latish for a working lunch, and this was Adelaide, so surely we’d be fine.

Oggi’s has a beautifully fit out entrance: the door takes you through a moody bar space with a checkerboard floor.  We hovered awkwardly for a minute or so - Do we walk in?  Do we wait for somebody to greet us? - before making our way to the end of the bar, where it opens up into the restaurant.

And what a restaurant!  It looked like a whole different venue: trendy and light-filled with plants draping from the ceiling and communal tables.  There were a few groups of diners scattered about but space enough to be seated... though perhaps not with a couple of carry-ons.  Yes, they do have storage space, but we found you had to ask.

At this point, one batch brew and two mimosas into my day, I was starved and dangerously at risk of over-ordering.  Especially with the doughy scents of bread and pasta in the air.

Osteria Oggi, if the name doesn’t give it away, is an Italian venue.  Classic me, I’d done my research before coming: pastas hand-made fresh every day.  So of course we had to get one.  I made L pick (she’s a much fussier eater than me), and she did well, choosing a baked eggplant-tomato-and-cheese combo that was the highlight of the meal.

But I’m skipping ahead.  

We started with the bread, as one does.  I’m a big believer in getting this when eating at a ‘foodie’ place.  Firstly, I don’t make bread myself (I’m far too impatient) and secondly, a place with good food is not likely to mess up such a staple.  In fact, the odds are that you might just end up discovering something wonderful at a comparatively low cost.

Unfortunately, that was not the case here.  The bread was… bread.  Supermarket stuff.  Probably not as good as the high-end supermarket stuff that’s baked in-store.  Which was disappointing, but somewhat offset with the olive oil it came with.  That, my dear readers, was divine.  And we were hungry, so the bread was drenched in as much of the oil as possible and devoured.

Beef carpaccio was next.  The beef was rich, and the flavouring was creamy and luscious.  I do think added texture would have been nice; the ratio of artichoke crisps that it came with was underwhelming.

The pasta, though, was faultless.  It retained texture even with double-cooking.  And the classic combination of sauce that it came with was probably exactly what we needed after a liquid breakfast.

In an attempt to add a little health to the meal, we ordered a side of greens too.  It certainly looked good: that bright colour of vegetables cooked just so.  It tasted - okay, I guess.  Kind of like the bread.  It needed something more, and I couldn’t help but compare them to those I had the evening before, cooked perfectly by AB (I’ll get the recipe soon).  Similar cooking method: steam-fried, but AB added lemon juice to the broccolini and the result was something much more flavourful than we paid for at Oggi.

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‍_{* a feeling magnified by living in London for seven years}