Simone's

Pine mushrooms and slippery jacks, prickly chestnuts and sunshine-y quince. Victoria's north-east in late autumn is a foraging bonanza, but it's a wise idea to cart any haul back to Melbourne and concentrate remaining energies on the region's restaurant scene.

There's Provenance in Beechworth, of course, and interesting little Bright newcomer Tani. But for many pilgrims, a visit to the spiritual home of ski hire inevitably means a visit to Simone's.

The beauty of Simone's, opened by George and Patrizia Simone in 1986, is that it has resisted the cynicism of old age. None of that tired story here of rising prices and falling standards. If anything, recent years have seen it trying too hard to change with the times instead of respecting what made it great in the first place, because the single, encapsulating sentence that had served it so well for 20-plus years - "great regional produce with a poetic Italian heart" - was all of a sudden undermined by new and bewildering moves.

We're an exacting lot over at the Good Food Guide, and the past two years saw Simone's shed its two hats. So much for history. This is a celebration, a joyous huzzah that the north-east's restaurant scene has been restored to balance after Simone's scratched its modernist itch, decided avant-gardism merely got in the way of great Italian food and went back to what the Simone family does best. And all without hauling Patrizia back to the kitchen from which she was recently liberated after 20-plus years of dedicated service. Bright's own celebrity chef is working the floor alongside husband George, and their chef son, Anthony, more or less rules the pans these days.

His refocus starts with a splash of vincotto in good local olive oil, replacing the spherical balsamic "pearls" accompanying the rugged house-baked bread on my last visit. Or the house-made pasta fresca - elastic, curly-edged ribbons of hand-rolled tagliatelle - with pine mushrooms and marsala-poached chestnuts in a silken tomato sugo that subsumes blobs of chestnut cream into its lush tide. It's the sort of dish that can only dream of being pretty, but who cares?

Simone's still charts its own course. It doesn't stick to Italian food's holy trinity of rustic, regional and sparse. The golden-skinned quail comes with preserved hen's yolk, the salt curing amping up its rich egginess; on top, a "crackling pangrattato" of oily fried breadcrumbs infused with cured pork (guanciale and pancetta, usually), and garlic and parmesan; on the side, the sharp sweetness of jam-ified wild blackberries.

Busier than die-hard Italian purists would concede is entirely correct, I concur, but it works - like the sliced duck breast that's paired with smoked eel and braised leg meat, and a firm slice of duck-neck sausage spiced with a cotechino-esque mix of cinnamon and clove, mace and nutmeg. You want more? There are brussels sprouts, and the measured sweetness of vanilla-poached chestnuts and pickled quince. It's robust and generous, the improbable-sounding (but effective) duck and eel combo hailing from the Simones' Puglian family home.

Even the fish is local. Trout from nearby Harrietville is smoked and anointed with dehydrated black olives and bottarga, a shard of the caramelised skin balanced over it like a piece of Kennett-era public architecture. Underneath, there's lime and lemongrass-accented zucchini "carpaccio", balsamic-soaked red onion and vinegary boiled potatoes.

I really like the way Simone's is a seasonal taste of the north-east given a thoroughly Italian spin. It's food that suits a restaurant that knows where it's been. You see it in the decor - a charming mishmash of objects d'cuisine and bold expressionist paintings, the kind of design pieces accumulated over a lifetime, not ordered by the crate from a warehouse - and service, which is informed but laid-back, with enough country friendliness to give life to the cliche.

The watermelon soup will have gone off the menu by now but it's worth mentioning for being the antithesis of a gewurztraminer "soup" with raw pumpkin that haunted my dreams last time I visited, a year ago. Thisminestrone di mellone fits the dessert brief perfectly, although now we're packing the thermals, the caramelised Bartlett pear and custard millefoglie - the Italian millefeuille - with a textured oat-based crumble, is more comforting and coddling.

Bravo. It's good to see such a significant regional restaurant shrug off its succession wobbles and get on with doing what it does best. Bright's star shines again.

THE LOW-DOWN
The best bit The return of a country champion
The worst bit Uncomfortable wooden chairs
Go-to dish Smoked Harrietville trout

Twitter: @LarissaDubecki or ldubecki@fairfaxmedia.com.au