Lombra, Charles St, West Lakes | SA Weekend Restaurant review

A relatively new restaurant at West Lakes is already notching awards as the state’s best Italian eatery. Our reviewer likes the venue, but finds the food isn’t quite there.

Lombra at West Lakes has been crowned the top Italian eatery in SA. So our reviewer thought he’d pay it a visit.

Some great moments of my formative years were witnessed from the windswept stands and bum-numbing seats of the old Football Park.

A State of Origin win over the Vics and the mighty Bloods’ 1983 Grand Final triumph are two that come to mind.

The footprint of that once-mighty auditorium has been erased and the hopes and dreams of footy fans heading to West Lakes have been superseded by the aspirations of those seeking a home.

Housing developments have quickly taken up the vacant land and the last remaining oval, home to the Crows before the move to Thebarton, is now hemmed in on all sides.

The dining space at Lombra restaurant, in the Ocea apartment complex at West Lakes.

This is where you will find the Ocea (no, I didn’t forget the “n”) apartment complex and, at its base, the welcoming Italian ristorante Lombra.

In the words of the real estate trade, Lombra has good street appeal, with most tables filled, soft lighting, a palette of pale peach and white, and the original ceiling screened by the gentle curves of wave-shaped baffles that must also help with the noise.

Once inside, the polished bronze dome of a wood oven builds on the positive impression, as does the fabulous sing-song accent of our waitress. Like most of the staff, she is Italian.

Co-owners chef Fabio Di Verio and his partner Silvia Montini, it also turns out, are recent arrivals from Rome.

The third partner is Davide La Scala, an Australian with a strong Italian heritage, who already had city eateries Est Ovest and the more casual Bocelli when they all opened Lombra early in 2022.

Fried calamari at Lombra restaurant at West Lakes.

A pizza and the porchetta plate.

Success has come quickly. Last year it was named the state’s premier Italian restaurant in the industry awards … hence my interest.

It’s certainly easy to see why Lombra should appeal to the local community.

As well as the always-popular Neapolitan-style pizzas, the menu (a duplicate of Est Ovest) has plenty of choices from the standard Oz-Italian playbook, along with a few eye-catching departures.

“Montanare”, for example, is a street snack from Naples using puffy balls of fried pizza dough.

Montanare classica is one of the Italian offerings on the Lombra menu.

For the “classica” these little doughnuts are topped with a passata of San Marzano tomatoes and a dollop of buffalo ricotta, a combination that would have reached greater heights if the base and sauce were warmer.

It’s not an issue for awesome arancini that break open with a whoosh of steam to reveal a filling that is as much chopped mushrooms as it is a provolone and parmesan risotto.

Fried calamari is also excellent, featuring the slender, sweet tubes and tentacles of trawled baby squid that is infinitely better than the sloppy seafood strips seen elsewhere.

Coarser semolina flour also adds interest to the coating.

Spaghetti’s bulked-up cousin spaghettoni is used for a vongole that is pared back to the essentials – steamed cockles, a few shrivelled cherry tomatoes and a skerrick of finely chopped parsley.

Nothing wrong with this minimalist, produce-led approach but reducing the cockle liquor a little further so it adheres to the pasta strands, and boosting the garlic and chilli, would make this a real winner.

“Porchetta Plate” turns out to be a board loaded with enough chunks of roasted potato and fried pizza sticks to feed a boatload of rampaging Vikings.

The spaghettoni con vongole with cockles and tomatoes.

The all-important pork, however, seems to have been roasted earlier, cut into fine slices and reheated to order.

The result is like uncured bacon, with some nice sizzled fat at the edges, but none of the juicy, joyful belly meat expected. We should have ordered a pizza.

For dessert, the cannolo has clearly been filled much earlier as the shell bends rather than snaps and can be cut easily with a fork.

Far better is the delizia al limone, a specialty from the Amalfi coast, in which a dome of limoncello-soaked sponge cake is layered with lemon custard and cream. Think of it as a citrus version of tiramisu.

Lombra has a pretty room, some charming people on the floor and a generous spirit.

Perhaps we ordered badly but it needs more consistency and a few procedure changes in the kitchen to be a true premiership contender.