You Should Be Into Sydney’s Fratelli Fresh & Cafe Sopra

Do you people know about this? If not, that’s awful, but it certainly makes me feel as if I have a point in life, as if I am some meaningful connector.

Since 1974, Fratelli Fresh has been growing into Sydney’s premier grocer. Grocer, meaning high end Italian imported goods and fresh vegetables like you can’t find anywhere, add an incredible dosage of coolness in the displays, the bags and boxes for carrying the goods home and the T’s the staff wear and I am warming you up to just how amazing this place is.

Obviously a trendy grocers is not all, for this kind of excitement, there is of course Cafe Sopra. At both the Dank St, Waterloo and new(er) Macleay St locations, Cafe Sopra operates from 12-3pm during the week with all seats full, everyday, by 12:01. The food is cataclysmicastical (in fact it is so good I invented a word), if you aren’t happy with my foolhardy recommendation perhaps the fact that Vogue Entertaining has produced a cookbook of recipes by Sopra will be enough, I am struggling away with this as we speak. Basically in New Zealand there is a few genuine genius pizza joints and a couple of good Italian dishes but Sopra, oh Sopra, dispatches such notions with an offering of modern/traditional/original/simple/complex and downright special Italian plates that make you understand why that crazy little country has had so much of an impact on the way the world eats!

The menu is scratched up every day on the blackboard and then lined away as different items are ordered off the menu. The staff are either accented young hunks with good 5 o’clock shadow or more mature women that glow of traditional knowledge and healthy beauty, like any gorgeous young mother in Italian cinema.

As far as ordering this really is where the problems begin, because, first of all its only lunch, and secondly you must dedicate 3 courses plus a deep fried zucchini flower, at the least. My favourite order would be the ox heart tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella salad, followed by the beef carpaccio, desserted by an eton mess, oh and of course started with a Campari and Blood orange, which you may say tastes like aluminum, and you may have a point, but it makes me feel sophisticated and handsome, on which both points need constant re-edification.

The crowds there are always of interest, as it is plunged by the hot and fabulous, the rich and famous or the old and face-lifted. This gives the experience an even more Italian air as you gossip and bitch whilst pillaging the plates and as long as you beat Neil Perry (Famous chef? Rockpool? No? You need to eat more) and his ponytail to the counter you’ll feel like a celebutant yourself.

So be into Fratelli Fresh and Cafe Sopra because you should. I only hope Hungry Fran agrees, because if I am just a dog chasing cars, she is the sultan of swing.