Marta Osteria
Friends, it has been a while! In a small space of time I’ve gone from engaged to married, been on my first overseas holiday since the ‘vid and most importantly moved to Sydney (for now). You can still expect the same, delicious reviews of what I’m eating here and on Instagram but get ready to find out about what is on the menu this side of the ditch!
One of the things about living in Sydney I look forward to is being able to eat good Italian food. New Zealand doesn’t have an especially large Italian community, and unfortunately it shows in the average number of good Italian restaurant options available.
I’d spied Marta Osteria, a shining beacon on an unseasonably cold evening walk located in Rushcutters Bay. The place was sexy and chic, as were all the patrons sitting inside. Out in the cold, I felt that classic pang of an outsider wanting to be inside. Many innovations came out of the pandemic and restaurants had to adapt to survive. Marta started selling takeaway baking out of a window and the rest is history. They now continue to sell their popular pastries and baked goods on the weekends.
For now however, I was seeking something more substantial and booked ourselves in for an evening with Marta. Along the front side of the restaurant are the cutest nooks cut into a long leaner with high chairs perfect for twosomes. The restaurant itself centres on a large open U-shaped bar from which bartenders are busy pouring some of the best negronis in town.
Ordering at Marta is fun with an uncomplicated menu lined with tick boxes from which you place your orders. I’m mostly on-call these days so I’m becoming a discerning mocktail drinker, and their virg-sion (see what I did there?) of a negroni spritz is delicious with bitter botanicals and thankfully doesn’t resemble juice.
I still haven’t seen My Octopus Teacher, and I don’t think I ever will, otherwise I won’t be able to continue to enjoy octopus, or as the Italians call it; polpo. Marta serves our high IQ friend tenderly grilled on a bed of creamy cauliflower puree with pea tendrils and rosemary, the charred flavours a lovely warming intro to the rest of dinner.
We also whet our appetites on burro e alici, thick butter and anchovy bruschetta. Oh yes, that ratio of butter to bread is luscious and perfectly seasoned by juicy, umami anchovies, which add an almost sweet quality to the mix. Leave your fishy preconceptions at the door when you eat this and you won’t be disappointed.
Marta has an excellent selection of pizzas and pastas to choose from, and we ate from both sides of the menu. I’m always keen to try novel pasta shapes and couldn’t look past the tubetti, mini tube pasta served with mussels, chickpeas, garlic, chilli, rosemary and parmesan. This was one of my favourite dishes of the evening: comforting, rib-sticking, just the thing to have on a very cold night. The well emulsified sauce was creamy without being cloying with lovely briny pops lent by the mussels (which I must say are rather tiny compared to their fat-lipped Kiwi counterparts). Again rosemary featured here to tie the dish together in a fragrant warming bow.
The name of the pizza we ordered, the Colosseo, made clear allusions to the epicness of the dish which we chose to ignore. What arrived was nothing short of magnifico. Mortadella doesn’t feature nearly as often as it should on menus in New Zealand so I jumped at the chance to have it on a pizza. What arrived was a gorgeously burnished crust paved with thin slices of creamy potato, tangy mortadella sausage, thick dollops of truffle paste and a big, fat, burrata in the middle. You should probably watch the video of Mitch pulling the burrata on my Instagram. There’s no hiding from the gorgeous aroma of truffle here and the burrata is easily one of the best I’ve had, super creamy in the middle with a distinctive tang that complimented the mortadella so well. This pizza not only looks spectacular, it tastes spectacular as well.
As you can imagine, after consuming double (well triple carbs if you count the tubetti) and a large bulb of burrata, try as I might I could not find the space for dolce. If I had however, it would have been the tartufo, a hazelnut and chocolate gelato dome with a chocolate centre. I will be wondering about what this entails until me next inevitable visit to Marta.
Marta Osteria
30 McLachlan Ave,
Rushcutters Bay,
NSW 2010
Ph. (02) 8096 8452