Justine Grill

It was with some reservation I made the booking at Justine Grill. What was I to expect from a restaurant headed by a Michelin-trained chef with a name that sounded like a suburban chicken shop?

It's the first thing I ask Marcello Guzzo​ when I meet him – what's with the name? He tells me the restaurant's namesake, his grandmother Justina, is the essence of his connection to food. As a toddler in Brazil, he spent many hours in the kitchen with his hard-working grandmother, who was the daughter of Italian migrants. "Everything starts with her," he says.

His new restaurant in Hunters Hill is the culmination of a lifelong love affair with food, which became a professional pursuit for Guzzo when he took over his family's catering business as a 16-year-old.

He has since travelled the world refining his skills and, for five years, he trained in France at Michelin-starred restaurants, including at Hotel du Palais.

Now, combining his heritage and experience, he cooks using French techniques and classic Italian and Brazilian flavours.

While Guzzo is the master of the kitchen, his wife Luiza, who greets us at the front door, works the floor with all the warmth and charm you would hope to find at a family-run restaurant. The timing of the courses is perfect – quick but not rushed.

We order mostly seafood dishes – seared scallops, prawns au sambuca, and a seafood curry – as well as a nicely cooked beef eye fillet. The presentation is very impressive. The prawns come with an orange and ginger foam and a creamy celeriac, which is rich in flavour and slightly sweet, while the scallops are served on a creamy corn mousse with crisp, salty pancetta chips.

The most distinctly Brazilian dish on the menu, and the highlight for me, is the moqueca bahiana curry made with coconut cream, salt-water barramundi, prawns and mussels cooked in a chilli broth. It is deliciously creamy and rich, but not too heavy.

The most fun, however, comes with the desserts.

First we eat what tastes like a traditional apple and rhubarb crumble, hidden inside a white chocolate egg along with macadamia, aloe vera sorbet and a syringe of vanilla bean anglaise. The honeycomb parfait is shaped like a honeycomb with honey in the middle and a flat, crispy banana galette pastry on the side. We love the excitement of eating them, with their clever construction and unexpected flavours.

By the time we finish eating, it is dark outside the large windows and the dining room is lit with candles. The sandstone cottage looks like a boathouse from the inside with framed paintings of the beach and a toucan hanging on the white weatherboard walls. When Guzzo comes over to talk to us at the end of the meal, he explains he wanted the food to be of fine-dining quality but the atmosphere to be relaxed. "I don't want it to be so formal that people get scared to sit down and eat the way they want to," he says.

The heritage building is a dining institution in Hunter Hills. For many years it was home to Jaspers, one of Sydney's stalwart fine-dining restaurants, while more recently it was the site of popular Thai eatery Five Spice.

When Guzzo acquired the premises earlier this year, he was not intimidated by the ghosts of restaurants past. He seems absolutely at home in his kitchen, bothered by very little other than making good food.

THE PICKS Moqueca Bahiana curry, Apple and rhubarb crumble

THE LOOK Classy fine-dining without pretension

THE SERVICE Warm, chatty and experienced