Loading Zone

The rise in no-fuss, bric-a-brac street cafes in Canberra in just a few short years has been astounding, and now you can rock up to places in Marcus Clarke Street, Lonsdale Street, and even neighbourhood shopping centres for a proper coffee and decent food in the coolest of surrounds.

The Loading Zone is like the extreme of these places, in a dumpster zone in the middle of the Melbourne Building, a laneway that's tatty, even a bit stinky, and entirely unreconstructed. Which of course makes it ultra cool and the perfect place for lunch.

Joseph Cataldo is gradually firming up the space here, from a few tables and a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop, during our first visit he's got a tent and heaters crammed with tables, a blackboard menu and table service, and soon he'll have an awning giving solid and more permanent shelter to the keen band of diners and coffee drinkers. As well as breakfast and lunch, he plans to open Friday nights for drinks and his simple pasta menu, probably in October.

And it's welcome. Generous plates full of fresh, good pasta, gutsy sauces, fresh interesting salads and warming soups. Just a few wine offerings, all by the glass, which makes sense in the context – it's not the kind of place you settle in for a long dinner.

We didn't book, which could have been risky as it turns out, with the Loading Zone quickly filling up and before long a queue waiting for diners to vacate. We're here early enough to grab a table, and even though it's a freezing day and we've coated up in the expectation of sitting in a wind tunnel, it's cosy, warm even, in the tent with the gas heaters.

Service is willing and happy, the kind of service you get when the staff are buoyed by the general popularity and buzz surrounding the place they work. This sense of freshness and success always gives a place a good kind of energy.

But excitement must be backed by good food. And, excellently, it is. Joseph Cataldo is a pastry chef – he makes the Portuguese tarts and other pastries for this place as well as for his Bean in the City. He's from a food-obsessed family – the Cataldos of hairdressing fame and Italian heritage, and their commitment to good, family-style, peasant Italian food is unsurpassed. So Loading Zone makes its own sausages, cooks down sauces to make a rich ragu to use in different dishes, and makes pasta fresh.

Today, the blackboard menu offers a soup and three pastas, plus a couple of salads. Which means we can order basically everything.

Slow-cooked duck with roast pumpkin in tomato sugo on penne is just that, loads of duck still in big pull-apart hunks of shreddy meat in a rich tomato sauce, with eggplant and zucchini, and yes, with penne. Penne the way we eat it always feels a waste of time to me. You want really good bitey pasta you can get your teeth into and the pasta, too, can get stuck into. Sadly, the pasta we mainly get in this part of the world is shiny and boring, and that's no different on the plate today. But this is the case in every penne dish I have ever ordered in Canberra. And the sauce in this dish is great, meaty, rich and satisfying.

Pappardelle with portobello mushrooms, mascarpone and hazelnuts is on good, freshly made wide strips of pasta. The sauce is rich and much better than I'm expecting from the definition, frightened as I am by the promise of creamy pasta sauces. It is creamy, but not overwhelming, and is full of mushrooms and leek, a mouth-sticking dish and I like it a lot.

You can have pasta for $15 by itself or $22 with home-made sourdough and salad, which is what we do. The bread with olive oil and balsamic is good, and we're given two kinds of salad – an apple slaw which is simple, fresh and nicely dressed, and a fennel and orange salad, with olives, a beautifully dressed salad full of vim.

Today's soup is a seafood broth, and it, too, hits the balance right, It's described as a "chowder", but is really a light, clear soup with celery and carrot, delicate in the vegetables, which works properly with the chunks of salmon.

Since we were bent on ordering essentially everything, we started with a pastry, a long roll of gently curried chickpeas, lentils and vegetables – a large vegetarian pastry, which, like the pasta, is sticky, pleasantly gummed together in a likeable texture with spices and fennel lifting the flavour. It's been presented to us sliced up and on a little board, with a bowl of yoghurt sauce. I imagine if you worked in this area you might be addicted to grabbing one of these for lunch.

We've been offered a glass of sangiovese, shiraz or sauvignon blanc. They're just $5 a glass and served in a tumbler, which seems in keeping with the street aesthetic. Since we're channelling Italy, we choose the sangiovese and it's quite fruity, a simple sort of wine, fine in the circumstances.

On the dessert menu, it's about the kinds of pastries made for taking away. I suggest you grab one of Cataldo's little Portuguese tarts – they have a following for a reason. Because it's there, we order a kind of folded-over dessert pizza arrangement, filled with chocolate and banana. Not sure about this one, it's a pretty heavy way to finish a meal. And a coffee, which is great.

In all, a very cool little laneway cafe serving great simple Italian food in a tent that keeps the shabby bohemian feel but shields you nicely from the wind tunnel.