A culinary fusion of British and Italian cuisine isn't the most obvious – but given how much Brits love a holiday on the Med, perhaps it was inevitable. At Italian stalwart Pendolino's more casual younger sibling restaurant, La Rosa, a new pop-up steakhouse celebrates the best of British cuisine with a touch of Mediterranean pizzaz.
La Rosa is set in the glass-stained windowed Strand Arcade in the city, a building populated with Australian fashion brands and niche boutiques selling hand-poured chocolate and stylish hats. La Rosa, like Pendolino, is decidedly Italian – and so, makes the perfect setting for the Milan Cricket Club, overseen by Nicholas Hill, who has most recently been charming regulars of the Old Fitzroy Hotel in Woolloomooloo with his stylish take on British pub classics.
Hill will be dishing up plates like his acclaimed Scotch egg with Oxford sauce; raw beef on dripping toast; grilled tongue on anchovy; whole flounder with green sauce and lemon; and a pig's head schnitzel. The must-have dish, though? The Florentine T-bone cut, a style of steak popularised and refined in the villas of Tuscany by English intellectuals in the 19th century.
As part of Good Food Month in October, a one-night-only event on October 21 will shine the spotlight onto all things pork. Hill, along with chef-turned-butcher Michael Robinson, will create a nose-to-tail ‘Butcher and the Chef’ dinner featuring dishes like crispy pigs tails; terrine with ears and endive; and roasted, dry-aged cuts.
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