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New plans for Lonsdale St

Kirsten Lawson
Kirsten Lawson

Pasquale Trimboli inside Italian and Sons.
Pasquale Trimboli inside Italian and Sons.Alex Ellinghausen

The Trimboli brothers are full steam ahead with new eatery plans, signing off on new space in their Lonsdale Street building for an indoor-outdoor wine bar and an eat-in, take-out Italian grocer.

Pasquale Trimboli says the Italian wine bar site is behind their restaurant, Italian and Sons, and will serve as an outdoor dining space for the restaurant as well as a bar. He’s not revealing the site of the grocer yet, since it’s still occupied, but it’s in the same block fronting Lonsdale Street and will seat up to 200. It will also have a large outdoor space which Trimboli, also an architect, wants to make into the city’s best outdoor dining space.

The Trimbolis are advertising for a chef and they have scheduled an opening date for the second half of the year.

In one of those strange circles of the Canberra dining scene, Mick Chatto now heads the kitchen at Italian and Sons, with Carolyn Miller taking six months off. Among Chatto’s former ventures in Canberra were Artespresso about five years ago and Pelagic in 2011.

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But that’s not all. Trimboli says the promised hole-in-the-wall wine bar at his other restaurant, Mezzalira, on London Circuit, will open this month. They’ve taken over a stairwell between Mezzalira and Charcoal, just 1.6m wide and 6m deep, and are turning it into a “pizzicheria”, called Da Rosario, after Trimboli’s father. You sit or stand on the sidewalk, for a glass of wine and a snack – marinated sardines, cheese and panini. Excellently cool.

The long-awaited refurbishment of Mezzalira is also scheduled for this year.

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Kirsten LawsonKirsten Lawson is news director at The Canberra Times

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