Zafferano review; Italian restaurants Sydney; Italian restaurant Paddington

When chef Simone Crivello and partner Isobel Galloway signed the lease on Zafferano’s premises in 2020, it was a week after they’d first stood inside the elegant, wide-windowed corner building on a spur-of-the-moment recce.

Their aim was opening a trattoria, a tribute to Crivello’s father’s seafood restaurant, Trattoria Francu U’ Piscaturi, which he founded in Capo Zafferano, Sicily, in the 1970s.

Zafferano started as a cafe but, as lockdowns swung in and out, Crivello and Galloway managed three days as a trattoria in 2021 until the months-long shutdown began in July.

Both had poured their hearts into the business. Decor and fittings – created with the help of friends and family, including Galloway’s father, architect and designer Stephen Galloway – built a warm, buzzy and eclectic restaurant.

Dark wooden floors, Thonet bistro chairs, glowing orb lights and a green, marble-topped counter replete with fresh flowers, just-baked bread and glass water
carafes were without the hubbub of humans.

But local fan-love was strong. Crivello and Galloway pivoted to takeaway and people lined up at the door to take home pasta, seafood, roast meats and vegetables in Zafferano’s Sicilian-made ceramic dishes. The next day
they brought them back, washed.

Tonight, those locals are back inside, sitting in the balmy air as cicadas sing above plane trees and black-and-white-striped umbrellas shading the streetside al-fresco dining area. All, including us first-timers, are met with notable
warmth from staff.

If you book, staff members call you by your name, discuss the 12-bottle Sicilian wine and cocktail list and offer a taste of Crivello’s housemade Sicilian flour-and-semolina sourdough, made with a mother yeast begun three years
ago, with the ease of an old friend. Fake bonhomie this is not. It’s also authentic Sicilian food, inspired by Crivello’s heritage growing up in a restaurant.

“I want to bring to my customers the authenticity, all the lost flavours,” he says.
“Every single dish I do, I try to remind you of your grandmother’s sauce, your grandmother’s roast, the kinds of flavours and aroma you will smell when you were kids inside the house. When my customers say that’s what it tastes
like, I know I did a good job in the kitchen.”

We start, on a staff recommendation, with panelle – deep-fried chickpea fritters, with bread, olives and Sicilian olive oil, and carpaccio di pesce.

‘Every single dish I do, I try to remind you of … the kinds of flavours and aroma you will smell when you were kids inside the house.’

Chef Simone Crivello

The panelle – a popular street food in Sicily, particularly in the capital city Palermo – are deceptively simple-looking. Each golden folded pocket is a melty fennel seed-imbued marvel. Even better with squeezes of lemon.

The carpaccio di pesce, which arrives soon after, resembles a beautiful spring meadow, with slivers of white fish resting in olive oil, latticed with saffron threads and sprinkled pomegranate and tiny azure petals. Its fresh, citrus,
tart flavours are savoured.

The printed menu features four pasta mains, with four salad and vegetable
side options, and a brown paper list on the wall offers four daily specials, divided
between starters and mains.

We choose risotto marinara, also available with spaghetti, and, from the specials, costata d’agnello al forno. The marinara, edged by mussels in their shell, with a centre bustle of clams, cuttlefish, prawns, crab, plump rice and rich tomato sauce, is irresistible stuff.

Equally, costata d’agnello al forno – almond-crumbed, herb-flecked lamb chops with baked potato and carrots – bears wonderful home-cooked flavours and tenderness.

It’s not cheap to eat at Zafferano. Starters, mains and sides swing between $15 and $42, and it’s unlikely you’ll settle the bill after swooning over just the panelle. Not when tempting bowls of fragrant cuttlefish calamarata pasta and pesto and prawn linguine are being delivered to nearby tables.

But, it is entirely worth it. The food is lovingly made, the staff are blissful and,
once you’ve seated yourself between the hand-painted-by-Galloway front counter, the glass-topped stands of cannoli, the framed black-and-white
photographs of Trattoria Francu U’ Piscaturi and the high wooden shelves of
Sicilian wines and clay Testa di Moro heads, little else matters.