Bond Street Cafe and Wine Bar

LOCATION
Off Chapel Street, near the corner of Toorak Road.

PROFILED BY DE GROOTS MEDIA
From the owner of Caffe Veloce, Mauro Marcucci, comes another clever Italian venue. Bond Street is a small wine-bar-cum-cafe-restaurant; the kind of place where you’d pop in for a drink and a snack in the early evening, or come later for something more substantial. It’s small, cosy and very cute. Half the space is taken up by the bar with a gleaming coffee machine that looks as if it is related to a Harley-Davidson. There’s a corner of the bar for those who want a quick coffee, or a glass of something headier. The rest of the room is taken up by compact tables set with paper covers upon which the menu is printed.

There are inizi to begin with, followed by – what else? – continui, with a few vegetable dishes and salads, and some desserts. Starters, which double as snacks, are as simple as stuffed fried olives, or a plate of prosciutto with parmesan. Or you could order a couple of marinated grilled lamb cutlets (priced per cutlet) and a salad. Pasta dishes are good, especially the spaghettini allo scoglio, which is a plate of thin spaghetti with mixed seafood, garlic and a little chilli. The blackboard lists the day’s specials, including the fish of the day – barramundi on a bed of char-grilled zucchini and roasted tomatoes, the night we were there. The wine list is impressive, with a wide range of Australian and international wines (especially from Italy, but some from Spain and Portugal as well), all cleverly classed according to style.

Rita Erlich