Images: Steven Woodburn courtesy Osteria Luna

WHAT DID Frank Sinatra eat?

It was the question that occupied Peter Fiander when he sat down to write the menu for Osteria Luna, the Italian restaurant that opened in December beneath The Charles Brasserie & Bar on King Street. The latest venue from Etymon Hospitality (the group behind Soluna, Poetica and The Charles upstairs) is a 106-seat homage to the Italian-American supper club, all burgundy velvet, blue leather banquettes and dark timber courtesy of design studio Tom Mark Henry. Head Chef Fiander, working alongside Executive Chef Billy Hannigan, decided the food had to hold its own against the room.

“We started thinking of movies like Goodfellas, and questions like ‘what did Frank Sinatra eat?’ We wanted the menu to match the energy of the restaurant,” Fiander tells Esquire. “When I think of this way of dining, I think of big, generous plates of red spaghetti, clams, more garlic than you can poke a stick at, and plate-sized pork cotolettas. So that’s exactly what we did.” (The Pippies Olio e Aglio, a nod to Sinatra’s pasta order of choice, made the cut.)

Fiander’s route to the pass was not a straight line. He grew up in Western Sydney on nutritious, “not particularly exciting” family dinners, and the moment most chefs describe as a calling arrived roughly a year after he’d already started cooking, during a trial day at LP’s Quality Meats under Luke Powell. “The way he spoke about everything they were doing in the kitchen was so infectious, and I knew immediately that I wanted to do what he was doing and I wanted to be great at it,” he says.

The deeper influence took longer to reveal itself. Weekends at his grandparents’ house meant roasts, and a house full of simmering preserves. “As a kid I hated the vinegary smell of the chutneys that filled the house as they cooked down, but now that I’m older these are exactly the sort of things that I have grown so fond of. That same smell I hated as a kid is so comforting to me now.”

The CV since reads like a map of Sydney’s better rooms: sous chef at Love Tilly Group’s pasta bar Ragazzi, then Porcine under Nik Hill, then Letra House. It was at the latter two that Fiander developed the whole-animal butchery that now anchors his cooking, breaking down an entire pig every fortnight at Porcine. “When you commit to purchasing such a large animal you are forced to become creative and find new ways to utilise each part of it,” he says.

That training surfaces most clearly in the dish he nominates as the restaurant’s thesis: the pork cotoletta, made with Black Berkshire pork, flattened, crumbed, fried and finished with brown butter, capers, lemon and parsley. “It’s generous, uncomplicated and moreish,” says Fiander. “Some things are classic for a reason.”

The theatre, of which there is plenty (a caprese assembled tableside, a silver bell announcing rounds of frozen limoncello coupes, DJs playing Italo disco from 10pm Thursday to Saturday while the kitchen runs until 1am), is handled by the floor rather than the plate. “Who is to say when enough drama is enough,” he says. “My idea of drama is a messy tablecloth stained with red sauce, red wine and maybe a little chocolate gelato at the end.”

Beneath the velvet and the Sinatra references sits a more practical concern: price. A weekday lunch offers a $28 chicken parmigiana with pasta, frites or salad and a drink, a rarity in the CBD, and one that Fiander traces back to his own early years in kitchens.

“I often think about when I was an apprentice going out for dinner, on my wage at the time I couldn’t necessarily afford to eat at the most prestigious restaurants. I want Osteria Luna to be the kind of place that a young apprentice, like myself 10 years ago, would feel welcome, comfortable and able to try a handful of delicious dishes without spending their entire weekly wage.”

Ambitions for the year ahead are stated plainly. “I want us to become synonymous with reliability and comfort,” he says. And for all the menu development and staff training, the reference point remains cinematic.

“I often think of the scene in Goodfellas when Henry Hill, the main character played by Ray Liotta walks into the restaurant and a table is carried above the crowd to the front of the room. I want every customer to feel like that when they walk into Osteria Luna, like they’re the most important person and we’ll always make space for them.”

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