EAT > Delmonte, Carlton (16/20)

On the corner of Lygon and Faraday streets, in the ground-floor space that housed the beloved King & Godfree deli for more than a century, Delmonte has arrived: a glamorous Italian wine room built by hospitality entrepreneur Jamie Valmorbida on the bones of his own family’s history. 

There’s a particular kind of pressure that comes with reopening the most sentimentally loaded corner in Melbourne’s Little Italy. Everyone who has ever bought a wheel of parmesan or a bottle of Barolo from King & Godfree has an opinion about what should happen to it next, and Valmorbida — whose grandfather Carlo took over the site in 1955 — knew it. Rather than dodge the weight of that history, Delmonte leans into it, trading the deli counter for a 160-seat dining room while keeping the produce-first instincts that made the old shop a Carlton institution. In our opinion, Delmonte is the most confident and best-judged addition to Lygon Street in a generation, though it isn’t quite the transcendent meal its pedigree promises.

AMBIENCE >

Design collaborator Dion Hall (Garfield, Johnny’s Green Room, Supernormal) has resisted the temptation to make Delmonte precious. Slick terrazzo floors, industrial tube lighting and utilitarian tiling nod to the deli’s practical, workaday past, while mismatched chairs, generous banquettes and a zinc-topped bar give the room the lived-in warmth that regulars are already comparing to Karen Martini’s cult 1990s haunt, the Melbourne Wine Room.

A red neon sign glows over the Lygon Street footpath, the kitchen is angled so its wood-fired grill and dessert station play out as open theatre, and alfresco tables are expanding onto Faraday Street. It’s a room built for grazing at the bar as readily as for a full sit-down blowout — what the team calls “the full catastrophe” — and it succeeds at both registers without feeling like it’s trying to be two restaurants at once, but note those hard floors and ceilings don’t do anything to dampen the sound and this can make it loud.

EAT >

Culinary director Karen Martini (Bar Carolina) has set the direction, with head chef Diana Desensi and executive chef Mark Glenn — both Martini alumni from St Kilda’s Saint George — running the pass. The philosophy is deliberately unshowy: familiar Lygon Street staples, executed with more precision and pushed harder on flavour. The snacking menu is the clear standout. House-baked focaccia Genovese arrives pillowy and glossy with oil; gnocco fritto, fried in chicken fat and draped with culatta and white anchovies, is the kind of dish that makes ordering a second round of martinis feel compulsory. Vitello tonnato, made with white veal from Donati’s — the historic Carlton butcher Valmorbida acquired this year — is served the way founder Leo Donati would have recognised it: thinly sliced, gently poached, no foams or flourishes, just a clean tuna sauce doing the talking.

Pasta is where Delmonte earns its “paradise” tag, since sister venues Garfield and Johnny’s have claimed pizza duties elsewhere in the precinct. Tagliatelle bolognese is rich and correctly restrained; the calamarata, tossed with prawn, clams and calamari in a yellow passata sharpened with colatura (aged anchovy fish sauce), has real depth without tipping into fishiness. Off the wood-fired grill, Donati’s steaks range from a single-serve bavette to a 900-gram salt-crusted rib-eye carved tableside for two — a genuine occasion dish. Dessert leans on neighbouring gelateria Pidapipo for scoops, alongside a classic tiramisu and a caramelised apple and custard torta from the in-room pastry station. Nothing here reinvents Italian cooking, and a couple of plates could use a touch more restraint on salt, but the hit rate on flavour is high and the kitchen clearly knows exactly what it’s trying to do.

DRINK >

Wine, not food, is the actual centre of gravity at Delmonte, and it shows. Head sommelier Michael Hegarty and George McCullough have built one of Melbourne’s strongest Piedmont-focused lists — around 300 bottles — bolstered by rarities pulled from the old King & Godfree cellar, some dating back to the 1950s and rarely seen outside private collections. 

The genuine curiosity on the list is a remade Delmonte shiraz: a revival of a label Carlo Valmorbida once imported from the Dolomites, now produced by the family-owned Tar & Roses winery — liquid family history, poured by the glass. At the bar, eleven cocktails cover the aperitivo brief neatly, with a quince-forward house bellini and a bittersweet chinotto spritz both well-judged for grazing alongside the gnocco fritto.

CONCLUSION >

Delmonte doesn’t try to out-fine-dine Lygon Street’s more ambitious newcomers, and that restraint is precisely its strength. It’s a wine room first, a pasta-and-salumi restaurant second, and an unapologetic piece of Carlton nostalgia third — and all three ambitions land.

A small bug bear was the table we were seated was right in the pass for all the waitstaff to bring food from the kitchen to tables, which meant I was jostled eveytime someone went by, the smart move would be to sacrifice a couple of tables and make a little space.

Delmonte rewards a long, unhurried visit at the bar just as much as a full sit-down dinner, and the wine list alone justifies a booking. Sure not every dish reaches the heights of the best snacking plates and the salt was way too high for me, but as a “new local” for one of Melbourne’s most scrutinised streets, Delmonte has more than earned its keep.

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Image Credit | ALMANAK & Delmonte

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