Locale

It's busy, packed in fact, and the staff are tearing around plastered with smiles and friendly words, in the way of the popular restaurants. Everyone's your friend, there's general mayhem and noise and everyone's having fun. It's a formula taken to an extreme at the louder city restaurants, and one in a more relaxed and approachable guise at this Deakin newcomer.

Locale has set up shop in a longtime restaurant spot – it was Cape Cod for some years, and I'm afraid whatever was here before has faded from memory. In those days, it was run in the traditional restaurant style, carefully laid out, formalised service and menu. The new owners have ditched all that, stuck a huge bar through the lion's share of the floor space, open kitchen behind, and squeezed tables around the place. It works to create an atmosphere of sheer intimacy and busyness. So much so that we can only grab an outside table, so we set up under a gas heater with blankets on the knees and feel perfectly happy.

The style is rustic, even to the choice of napkin, which goes with the woodfired pizza on offer, and the only thing in this set up that strikes an odd note is the music. It's weirdly boppy, not so much loud as intrusive, and doesn't match the crowd. Like it or not, you're going to get a slightly older clientele here, this is Deakin, after all, and the heart of the established inner south.

But we're focused on the food because, as usual, we're over-ordered in our greed disguised as a professional responsibility to try as much as possible of the menu. The calamari ($17) is fresh and super crispy and gently spicy, and generally untouched and not fiddled around with. Good. And we like it, straight from the fryer, done fast, served on crunched up paper.

The arancini ($18) are very pungent with porcini, with big balls of cheese at the centre, not in the super sticky style of arancini, but intense with the mushroom flavour, taleggio and truffle oil and nicely salty.

The ravioli is surprising because it's not the oft-served light and slightly boring version of ravioli but an intense version, where whoever's in the kitchen has given thought to an intense stock. Surely a stock of crab bones, it's funky, salty and dark like a dark fish soup. The pasta parcels, filled with crab meat, are big and bitey. And there are thin strips of asparagus and leek. It's a dish that speaks to barely suppressed ambition and penchant for robust flavours in the kitchen.

And as a result, we're looking at the blackboard specials through the window and wishing we had thought to order a mackerel dish with walnut puree. It sounds good and given the food to date it's the kind of dish likely reward a decision to order.

The pizza here is light and puffy and charry, not overfilled on top, and again, we're happy. For us tonight, it's a "Locale" ($23), a pizza of fior di latte, salami, gorgonzola, mascarpone – creamy, but not overly so, and rich but reasonably restrained. And a "Rustica" ($24) – a potato pizza with  fior di latte, Italian sausage, rosemary, gorgonzola and truffle oil. You'll be feeling the theme. With a glass of prosecco ($8.50) and another of the local Collector Rose Red City Sangiovese ($12), the wine works for us also. If we lived locally, we'd come here and order pizzas half the days of the week. A quinoa base, is available, by the way, for the gluten intolerant.

And we'd struggle not to finish with chocolate pudding ($14), a great warm strong sticky and rich pudding, runny on the inside, crisp on the outside, and served indulgently with peanut ice cream rather unnecessarily with sweet caramel.

The tiramisu ($14) doesn't have the thick custard we've come to demand of this dessert since an Italian and Sons epiphany, but is delicate and simple with plenty of moisture and creaminess, also essential to the Italian classic.

Locale is a highly welcome new eatery. It manages also to negotiate that difficult middle ground by not compromising in enthusiasm, confidence, flavour and respect for food while remaining firmly at the cheery end of cafes – easy to like, relaxed and a very good place to go.