La Madonna Nera’s fazzoletti with duck ragu is a very brown dish.

For a plate of pasta the colour of a 1970s business suit, it is perhaps the finest we’ve eaten this year.

Yes, you’re right, it’s not the first time we’ve said that. We’ve raved about some cracking good pastas in 2022, but this dish … phwoar!

It delivers turbo-charged flavour and extraordinary precision.

There’s a view that you can’t put too much mirepoix (the aromatic holy trinity of carrots, onions, celery) into a braise. It’s the base for just about every stew and meat sauce in existence.

A mirepoix undoubtedly boosts flavour and complexity. But it can be overdone. It can overpower the hero protein.

So when we sidled up to the pass to talk to the chef and praise the braise, we asked the question; did you use mirepoix?

No, just shallots, was the answer. Which we kind of knew, because rarely have we had a pasta sauce with such startlingly clear flavours devoid of any potentially muddying vegetal undercurrent.

It gets better. The fudgy braise of nicely chunked duck leg meat was soft and tender with not a skerrick of what might be called dryness. Nor was it greasy.

Allow me to rave for just a paragraph more. The duck was “dressed” in a reduction of the braising juice which was so clear and intense you could have drunk it as a consommé.

My god! The ragu was spooned over squares of house made fazzoletti (handkerchief) pasta which were thick, glossy, tensile to the bite and wonderfully al dente. Want more? The dish was topped with a layer of pangrattato, breadcrumbs fried in oil.

It’s a garnish which comes from cucina povera, an inexpensive textural element to dishes for those who traditionally have had to find uses for stale bread to stretch the budget. Except these were fried, not in olive oil, but in duck fat. Yep. And flawlessly seasoned. It was the perfect crunchy addition to a podium level pasta dish.

La Madonna Nera is the aspiration of a former architect, Fiona di Lanzo, who lost her soul to hospitality and cashed in her design business to pursue her dreams in a small, moody shop front on Scarborough Beach Road at Mount Hawthorn.

Di Lanzo and her business partner Nathan Catalano opened their petite Italian just in time for the COVID king-hit of 2020. They came close to shutting the doors before they’d had a chance to get a couple of quarters of revenue under the belt. They did takeaway service, like so many restaurants in Perth during that awful autumn and winter of 2020, and just scraped through.

We arrived on a Tuesday evening and were taken aback by how active the Mount Hawthorn strip is on an early weeknight. There was more foot traffic than a Prada runway show and what places were open (the new normal post-COVID is Wednesday-Sunday opening hours across the industry) were heaving. As was Madonna Nera, in all its Milan back-street style.

For starters we ordered a few small plates, of which the farinata with fried octopus and nduja mayonnaise, was the winner. Farinata is a flat bread or pancake made with chickpea flour. You’ll find versions all over southern Europe.

Nice, which was once an Italian city before the borders moved and it became part of France, has a version called socca, a fried pancake as flat as a high school brass band and superbly crunchy. Anyhoo, it was the star of the show. The octopus, an ingredient often badly cooked in Perth, was spectacular, as was the bitey nduja mayonnaise. Every day.

Amberjack crudo was a letdown. The green flavoured oil in which the thin slices of crudo sat could have been made by a greenskeeper. All we got from it was the disturbing flavour of grass clippings. It was also garnished with inexplicable green (unripe) slices of strawberry. It’s a chef thing, a garnish which crops up from time to time but is absolutely pointless. The fish was flawlessly fresh. As for the dish itself? Meh.

Braised fennel with whipped white beans and almonds was a step up. The fennel was served in thick slices, nicely soft and burnished with a seriously good char. The white bean puree was superb. Good cooking.

Back to mains and “24-hour beef cheek with oxtail jus and Jerusalem artichoke” was a flavour bomb, but overcooked.

Yes, one expects long-braised secondary cuts to be soft and moist and tender, but when the meat turns to mince in your mouth, literally dissolving away the moment you chew, it’s overcooked. It was underseasoned too. The highlight of the dish was the sauteed cavolo nero, Tuscan kale, scattered among the meat and juices. It had chew and an arresting green-black colour. Beautifully seasoned too.

If you can’t be bothered ordering, ask for the chef’s menu at $60 a head. It’s called the Magnà e zitt menu, which translates to “shut up and eat”. Gotta love that.

La Madonna Nera is a convivial place, full of cheerful, chatty guests of all ages and stripes. It lures you in with its moody lighting, dark finishes and a range of seating from bar top to communal long table and more traditional seating. It really does have the vibe of a back street tratt in Milan or Rome.

The wine list is very good and large by today’s standards, with mostly Italian titles from small producers and locally sourced bottles. It is a modestly priced list, which means you can have a night out without having your wallet flensed. But there are some lust-worthy big guns too, like a 2012 Paolo Bea Montepulciano Sangiovese for $210. We had a glass of Soave each – sorry, can’t remember the producer – and it was splendid, a wine which left a little savoury tingle deep down in the jaw after a fresh, dry, fruit-driven start. Marvellous.

Did we like La Madonna Nera? Yes, very much. It is the sum of its parts: good décor, proper Italian vibes, proper professional service and wines and food from a kitchen which knows what it’s doing, albeit with some missteps.

We’re going back on our own dime very soon.