Restaurant review: Cibo Kitchen, Woden

Where else to spend a weekend night than underneath the great apartment tower that dominates the Woden skyline on Hindmarsh Drive. Cibo Kitchen sits next to a hair salon, on the corner of Corinna Street, and has been open for about a month. Chef and co-owner Milica Stojanovic and her children closed their previous restaurant on the site, the Peppered Prawn, and reopened as the more modern Cibo Kitchen, where a little blackboard out the front doesn't offer the specials but instead suggests social media tags for diners. Outside there's an alfresco dining area decorated in the vintage style that's trending so hard right now - faux antique chairs and timber tables, pot plants on weathered stepladders, little cabinets, and a covered marquee with cushioned seats for cooler weather. Inside is a dining room divided by a white timber and glass partition, with tall bar tables in one front corner.

It's much more casual and it's reflected in the menu, which is Mediterranean with emphasis on Greek and eastern dishes - chevapi, saganaki, burek. There are a profusion of small plates to share and a shorter list of bigger dishes that touch on pasta, barbecued meat, sausage, seafood and chicken. Wines are middle of the road and mostly West Australian or Serbian and Croatian.

A wedge of saganaki grilled to melting ($16) comes with two rather tiny peppered figs but it's an otherwise excellent start to the meal, gooey, sweet and salty all at once. There might not be much of a view from the outdoor dining area, other than the traffic on Corinna Street, but on a warm summer evening you could do worse than watch the cars of Woden go by whilst picking at a plate of kobasice ($12), spicy pork sausage grilled on a bed of ajvar, the red pepper sauce that's like a Balkan peperonata. It's more fun also if you order a couple of Serbian aperitifs - plum or quince brandy ($7) that comes in adorably tiny triangular bottles and packs a big punch. A "Spanish prawn pot" ($18) is okay, with a couple of prawns over a bit of chorizo, but is otherwise unremarkable.

The larger dishes are marked on the menu as "more substantial" and they live up to this claim without being particularly big. There are lashings of tzatziki - on a plate of tender, charry pork souvlaki skewers that come with triangles of pita bread, so you can roll your own; on some barbecued lamb accompanied by couscous and rocket. A Cypriot salad of quinoa, green lentils and nuts and pomegranate seeds ($15) is refreshing but a beetroot salad with baby spinach and feta is drenched in balsamic and far too tart for my liking as a result. Still, it's easy enough eating - nothing that sets the culinary landscape on fire but perfectly fine for a dinner with friends.

Palacinke ($10) is the Instagram pick of the dessert dishes - two rolled crepes filled with Nutella and surrounded by bright pink meringue, a good hazelnut gelato and a shard of amber-coloured sugar glass. Very pretty but the crepes to my mind are thick and firm rather than thin, soft sheets. We're all much more enamoured of the krofne ($4 each), wonderfully fresh, fluffy doughnuts filled with tart raspberry jam. A generous serve of tiramisu ($10) is nice enough.

This is friendly neighbourhood dining, with happy, cheerful service and a quick succession of easy Mediterranean and Balkan dishes to share.

Cibo Kitchen

Address: 98 Corinna Street, Phillip

Phone: (02) 6162 0122

Website: cibokitchen.com.au

Chef: Milica Stojanovic

​Owners: Milica, Milan and Ivana Stojanovic

Hours: Lunch Wed-Fri 12pm-2pm; dinner Mon-Sat 5.30pm

BYO: Yes, $3 a glass

Noise: Low

Vegetarian: More entrees than mains

Score: 12.5/20