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The first frigid night I showed up at Johnny, Vince & Sam’s, the woman manning the door was in a circular conversation with a family at the front of a long queue.

“I can put you on the waiting list if you’d like,” she was saying to the mother of two shivering pre-teens. “I can’t put you ahead of other people who are waiting.”

“We thought this was the wait,” the mother replied, indicating the line. “We’ve been here for over an hour.”

Back and forth they went. When I was able to get a word in, I inquired, “So this line isn’t to get into the restaurant? It’s to talk to you to get onto a list to get into the restaurant?”

“Yes.”

“So how long is the wait after the line?”

“About an hour and a half.”

There’s a lot about the new Lygon Street restaurant from three-man comedy group Sooshi Mango that’s baffling, including the system for securing a table.

Why can’t the staff simply walk down the line and take everyone’s name? Restaurant computer systems are built for calculating wait times, for avoiding the very scenario that seems built into this place’s model: people standing outside in the cold for more than an hour before they are sent away for another 90 minutes.

According to brothers Joe and Carlo Salanitri and their friend Andrew Manfre, who make up Sooshi Mango, the restaurant is an attempt to revive the glory of Lygon Street and lean into the nostalgia of the Italian-Australian experience. It’s hard for me to accurately convey how perfectly they’ve captured that in the design of the space.

In their attention to outrageous detail, the owners have conjured the immigrant Italian/Greek suburban home with such accuracy, the space itself is an act of love – and comedy.

The carpet is floral; the tables are covered with lace, then plastic, and topped with heavy, cut-glass goblets; the wallpaper is a striped brocade. There are rococo statues and vases, landscape and portrait artwork from the 1970s, a wooden display cabinet filled with random tchotchkes, and a back hallway lined with poorly executed family photos in wonky frames. Even the bathroom taps are that brown, moulded plastic found in so many Melbourne homes in the 1970s and ’80s. The exactitude, and the affectionate humour behind it, are remarkable.

This isn’t the trio’s first foray into the culinary world – they also have a wine label under the name “Johnny Vince & Sam’s” (and yes, you can order it in the restaurant) – but in order to bring this place to life, they’ve turned to industry professionals: Johnny Di Francesco of 400 Gradi fame wrote the menu; Dani Zeini from Royal Stacks acted as service consultant; while Joel Hales, formerly of Capitano, is head chef.

The food, as you might imagine, is pure nostalgia, with some more modern elements thrown in. There’s a round of burrata from Campagna ($15), for instance, served on a plate drizzled with oil, but no bread on which to spoon it.

Meatballs come as an entree ($20) or over spaghetti ($29) and are tight, egg-heavy and served with a tomato sugo that’s extremely acidic.

That same sauce comes pooled around the eggplant parmigiana ($28), one of the better dishes on the menu, appropriately gooey and rich, and on the gnocchi ($32), which are soft but not pillowy – more of a moosh.

Some dishes are just inexplicably sloppy, such as a salad that looks as if someone took a head of fennel, went at it with a cleaver using their non-dominant hand, and then threw in some oranges ($14).

The pizzas ($24-$30) are good even though they veer away from the classic Italian-Australian version. Instead, they are long and bready, more of a flatbread.

It would be wrong to say that the service is great, because it’s highly disorganised. The servers themselves are good, though – particularly their brand of Italian sass, which is so convincing it couldn’t possibly be an act.

The owners have conjured the immigrant Italian/Greek suburban home in an act of love – and comedy.

The restaurant isn’t taking bookings, although it will at some point. I’m curious about this. The cynic in me is tempted to believe that a group whose career is dictated by social-media algorithms understands that long lines play extremely well on TikTok and Instagram.

Indeed, there’s much about the place that’s engineered for content: on the night of the freezing, three-hour wait, the woman in charge of the wait list did produce a trayful of “shots” and a waitress followed behind, filming as people in the line downed them. What fun!

Did it matter that the shots were non-alcoholic, basically thimblefuls of juice? Not to the ’gram.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine