La Cantina at Common Ground Project serves rustic Italian farm fare

Ultra comforting, cheese-stuffed ravioli, cooked-to-order risotto and cake that’ll make your heart sing— but is it some of the best Italian you’ll eat?

Is this the best Italian food in Victoria? Set the GPS to La Cantina at Common Ground project in Freshwater Creek to find out. Picture: Rebecca Michael.

Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. For the best Italian meal you’ll eat this year, go directly to Freshwater Creek.

Freshwater where?

Outside Geelong on the way to Anglesea, this little farming hamlet is where Nathan Toleman – he who has done much to define Melbourne’s world-renowned brunch culture with such venues as Top Paddock, Kettle Black and Higher Ground – a couple of years back set up a community farm called the Common Ground Project.

Back then, the not-for-profit social enterprise was focused on connecting hospitality professionals to the land through hands-on regenerative farming experience, with the aim of helping to improve mental health in the industry.

During last year’s lockdown, it offered a food relief program to asylum seekers in the Geelong region, preparing more than 3000 meals and 400 vegetable boxes for local food relief agencies.

Swordfish carpaccio sings of summer. Picture Rebecca Michael.

But now the farm outside is married to a farmhouse kitchen inside, and Toleman’s original vision for a full-circle farm-to-fork experience is at its clearest. And most delicious.

Husband-and-wife duo Glenn Laurie and Lolo Hanser have joined Toleman to create La Cantina.

In the kitchen, Laurie is putting all the lessons he learnt over many years at London’s famed River Café and reprise the Italian “cucina rustica” he served to much acclaim at Heildelberg’s Little Black Pig & Sons.

The weekly — but more often daily — changing menu makes the most of a wood-fired oven across a carte consisting of antipasti, a selection of fresh pasta that segues into bigger proteins before coffee and cake.

You’ll want to order from them all.

Best in class risotto. Picture Rebecca Michael.

While the farm out front is yet to reach its full productivity, it’s already providing abundant herbs and verdant colour to plates that are deceptively simple in their creation. This is cooking at its less-is-more best, where pristine produce is the prime attraction.

There’s nowhere to hide, for instance, on a plate of finocchiona — a fennel heavy Tuscan salami — that’s served simply sliced as is, alongside a rosemary-flecked farinata, a thin chickpea pancake. The crunch of the pan-warmed pancake at once crisp and creamy and the aniseedy bite to the salami makes for moments of pure pleasure ($20).

Likewise, a swordfish carpaccio, the firm flesh of the fish brightened and softened by the acid from tomatoes plucked from the garden and smooshed across, a few fennel seeds, a dusting of dried chilli and a few basil leaves torn atop — and a good glug of good olive oil — and you have a plate that sings of summer ($21).

Snapper with panzanella. Picture Rebecca Michael.

But all roads lead to pasta and today’s ravioli “verde” proves every effort that goes into handmade pasta pays off on the plate. These spinach rich pillows plumped full of buffalo ricotta are at once fluffy soft and firm and heady with marjoram’s sweet pine-like perfume, a buttery sauce of pecorino delivering cosseting comfort usually only found in a Nonna’s bosom embrace ($24/$38).

It’ll take 25 minutes for your cooked-to-order risotto to hit the table, but when it does you’ll never look at the staple the same again.

With starchy creaminess and just a touch of bite to each grain, today’s risotto alla salsiccia e fagioli teams borlotti bean heft with nuggets of pork sausage depth and the salty sharpness of Parmigiano-Reggiano. It is definitive ($26/$38).

Lamb comes roasted pink with satisfyingly gnarly wood-fired edges, its accompanying chickpea and chard braise rustically refined, the salsa verde atop full of capery vim ($39).

Pan-fried snapper is also excellent, crushed herby olives adding salt to the sea, a fluffy crunchy panzanella (toasted bread salad) with slippery peppers and purple basil from the garden finishes another picture-perfect plate ($42).

Almond and pear tart. Picture Rebecca Michael.

French-born Hansen runs the floor with breezy delight, offering a splash of Bellarine chardonnay here, a drop of Nebbiolo from there from the almost exclusively Victorian list that ticks off many of the Italian varietals increasingly at home here.

Her young team is equally joyful and together create a lazy weekend lunch the stuff of dreams.

The rustic farmhouse dining room of La Cantina at Common Ground Project. Picture Rebecca Michael.

As is the almond tart that may come studded with pear or fig or as it was today with apricots. The nutty frangipane, the sweet base and the sticky fruit is a stunning full stop, as elegant in its execution as a burnt caramel ice cream that pirouettes like a prima donna along the bitter sweet divide.

Completely, utterly enjoyable, La Cantina serves food I could eat weekly in a space charmingly rustic that will become evermore bucolic as the garden grows.

Best Italian you’ll eat this year? Set the GPS and find out.

Alfresco fun in the sun. Picture Rebecca Michael.

Owner Nathan Toleman (far right) with Chef Glenn Laurie and partner Lolo Hanser at La Cantina at Common Ground Project in Freshwater Creek. Picture : Ian Currie