Tedesca Osteria review: Brigitte Hafner, James Broadway open charming Red Hill restaurant
There’s a reason this charming Red Hill farmhouse restaurant is one of Victoria’s most in-demand restaurants — here’s how to nab a table.
Food
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It’s that time of year when we all need a hug. An all-consuming, heartwarming — like you really mean it — embrace.
There’s a lot happening in the world, but have you been outside?
As Melbourne dials up another wretchedly cold winter, there’s a way to soothe your soul in restaurant form at Mornington Peninsula farmhouse Tedesca Osteria.
Chef Brigitte (pronounced, Bree-Geeta) Hafner and business partner James Broadway opened in Red Hill weeks before Covid-19 consumed our existence in early 2020 and have continued to trade between lockdowns, peddling their farmhouse fare cooked over flames.
After creating a buzz with Fitzroy’s Euro-wine library and restaurant, Gertrude Enoteca, Hafner made the tree change and moved into a house with an Alan Scott-style wood-fired oven.
She’d never used a brick, slow-release bread oven during her stellar career under Kylie Kwong, Jacques Reymond and Guy Grossi, and ended up falling in love with the cooking style.
She even asked Scott’s son to build one at Tedesca.
Not one, but two heaving fireplaces are part of the restaurant’s charms, and the one in the dining room is a contender for the best in-restaurant fireplace in the state.
The same praise goes to the main dining room’s heavy textured timber door that’ll have you sizing one up for your own abode.
Tedesca plays to the farmhouse chic palate with a broody dining room awash with dark timber, rustic white tablecloths and an explosion of late autumnal foliage and fruits, namely bowls overflowing with persimmons and tamarillos.
The long room is bookended by an oddly placed bar, which seems jarringly out of the way, and that black-brick woodfire hearth and island bench where the action happens.
It’s where you’ll find Hafner stoking the flames and other chefs fussing over the final touches on a procession of meals designed to enjoy slowly during the afternoon.
A handwritten paper menu tells you what’s to come. It is ever-changing, more permanently every two to three weeks, and most of the produce is from the property, renowned local grower Mary Loucas or Torella Farms.
Hafner consciously procures from nearby farms but also flexes GOAT-status produce from world-best regions and, at times, marries both on the plate in delicious ways.
You may see sheets of jamon iberico tumbled with honey-licked persimmon cheeks from her own garden, teeming with toasted hazelnuts or barrel-aged feta from Greece, jazzed up with pomegranate jewels and walnuts.
Brined olives from her sister’s Main Ridge patch are among the early bites, before perfectly cooked coral trout that’s oven-roasted until the skin is shatter-crisp and tickled with a zingy tangelo citrus sauce and pistachio.
Here we take a brief pasta interlude of duck tortelloni parcels bobbing in a pool of burnt butter, breadcrumbs and sage, followed by a tour of Broadway’s wine cellar.
Hafner gets his lamb from Gundagai farmers, who grade it like wagyu and nerd out on “intermuscular fat levels” to determine the animal’s optimal fat-to-meat ratio (or all-round tastiness). She translates on the plate with two examples: an ultra-tender lamb cutlet, and a slow-cooked shoulder alongside butter-lobbed silverbeet with a creamy almond puree. It’s wonderfully treated and a quality expression of meat from first to last gnaw.
How else would you round out an afternoon of farmhouse feasting than with an apple tart?
Flaky pastry sheets conceal fragrant, cinnamon-spiced sturmer pippins plucked from the neighbouring orchard.
Like most good things, Tedesca is famously hard to land a booking, especially when the set menu is great value for $165 a person.
New tables are released every 90 days, but as it only fills 30-odd seats at a time across four lunches a week, things will be congested until November. But nothing is impossible; you may get lucky with a waiting list call-up.
While Tedesca won’t be marvelled for its technical dishes or cheffy brilliance, many will applaud its soul-warming, country-style fare.
Tedesca Osteria
1175 Mornington-Flinders Rd, Red Hill
Open: Fri to Mon: 12.30pm-4.30pm
Must-try dish: Duck tortelloni
Try this if you like: Du Fermier, Lake House
Cost: $165 per person, not including drinks.
RATING: 9/10
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