Locals are flocking to Italian restaurant Decca, where a top chef is dishing his greatest hits

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Sad tales about hospitality’s hard times appear to have been exaggerated. That’s the impression you get at Decca, anyway, where people are still dandling babies on their laps at 10pm on a rainy Wednesday night.

Restaurateur and chef Adam D’Sylva has lived in Melbourne’s north-eastern suburbs for 26 years and he’s nailed Alphington’s needs: somewhere you can drop in for pasta or steak, find a happy meeting place for pals from Toorak to Templestowe, gather for pinot noir and pepperoni pizza, book a 70th birthday in the function room or lug the littlies for dinner, knowing there’s kids’ spag bol for $18.

Setting aside a COVID-19-era consulting gig at W Hotel, this is D’Sylva’s first restaurant since Tonka in 2013, the hot Indian place that followed on from the even hotter multi-Asian Coda in 2009. Back then, D’Sylva was fresh off winning The Age Good Food Guide’s Young Chef award in 2007 and not long out of high-flying mod-Oz innovator Pearl, where he was head chef. Over the years, he developed a style that plucks from his Indian-Italian heritage and Aussie training. Decca ties it all together.

“I grew up with curry and pasta together on the table. It all works.”

Adam D’Sylva

A dish from the Pearl days is betel leaf piled with Thai-spiced prawn meat, battered in tapioca flour and fried into a translucent flavour bomb. That’s followed up with Italian-style calamari, a dish that’s easy to come by, but you need a plate like this – fresh, thinly sliced, expertly fried – to remind you why it’s special.

The menu is more Italian than anything else – there’s pasta, pizza, salumi and cannoli – but it’s eclectic. As D’Sylva tells me when I call to check facts, “I grew up with curry and pasta together on the table. It all works.” Decca diners are proving him right every day.

Paccheri are short, fat pasta tubes, perfect for hugging pork ragu made with sausage mince from local butcher Brenta Meats and cooked with mushrooms, thyme and cavolo nero. The dish is bold and brash and I only share it because I need a swap for my mate’s duck curry, served as a maryland, which makes it ideal for one person, or so she tries to tell me. The meat pulls apart, the coconutty yellow curry sauce heady but not hot: tick.

Between restaurants, D’Sylva launched Boca Gelato, which is available by the scoop and in a frozen tiramisu dessert. This isn’t my favourite, a bit fridge-y and the biscuit layer dry, but I’d come back for the classic creme brulee served in a broad, shallow dish so there’s more burnt sugar crust.

Decca is in the Alphington Paper Mill development, a half-built mess that’s been waiting for a supermarket for years. I miss the obscure sign to underground parking and end up leaving the car on a mudflat before trudging to the restaurant. It’s a beacon, curvy glass framing ruffled half-curtains,
and spilling with golden light.

Inside, the room flows past an open kitchen where D’Sylva finally has the pasta extruder and charcoal grill of his dreams. Waiters know the menu backwards and care whether you’re enjoying it.

The eight-page wine list offers such value I wonder if some prices are errors. To pull out one, Domaine Gautheron Chablis 2023 is $86 here and $75 online; usually, you’d expect a 100 per cent mark-up in a restaurant.

The value flows through the food menu, too, a sign of outreach and welcome at a place that has cannily assessed diners’ appetites and is being rewarded with roaring trade.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.