Tosolini's

When you see dishes called "Mama Tosolini's bolognese" and "Mama Tosolini's meatballs", you either roll your eyes and think, Italian cafe giving its dishes the sound of authenticity, or you jump at them, knowing that there is indeed a Mama Tosolini and she does indeed head into the kitchen to prepare some of these dishes.

Tina Tosolini is the mother of Carlo Tosolini, who opened Tosolini's 26 years ago, and still runs this all-day eatery. It aims to meet your every eating and drinking urge - from early right through for coffee or drinks, breakfast, lunch or dinner. It has a gelato cabinet, a cakes cabinet and a pizza display - selling it by the square like all those Roman cafes but something about loaded pizzas waiting in a cabinet is less than appealing.

It's an enormously pleasant place to sit - out under the tree on the busy corner with the cars and buses tearing past somehow only adding to the city atmosphere, or inside where the furnishings are in dark wood and chocolate-brown carpet, with a bar table along the window, and a secluded space with a big leather-look couch and chairs and a coffee table. It's set up to make you feel at home, whether you're here for drink, coffee or meal, and it does that well.

We're here for dinner and heading determinedly for the simple Italian-cafe style dishes on the menu. We avoid the mains, partly because they would have to be exceptional to justify the prices, especially in a cafe environment - they're priced from $29.90 for chicken with cotechino sausage to $37.90 for 200 grams of grass-fed steak with corn and zucchini, silverbeet and salsa verde. This is not out of whack with restaurant prices around the city, but not what we head to Tosolini's for.

We order four entree-sized dishes, which are so generous that each feels fine as a main. Mama Tosolini's spicy meatballs in a rich tomato ragu ($11.90) are on the "bar snack" list, on a card in a holder on the table. They're fantastic. Small meatballs, hot with chilli, fresh with a simple tomato sauce, just like I try and repeatedly fail to make them at home. This is a simple, homely, satisfying and lovely dish. Bar snack seems a slightly strange category for this dish. It would be great to tuck into these meatballs with a drink, but there's so much tomato sauce, it's more the kind of thing you would pile on potatoes or polenta or through pasta than eat by themselves. If you tackle them straight from a shared plate, it's not going to be elegant.

Gamberi alla diavola, or chargrilled king prawns marinated with chilli and garlic ($19.90) is on the antipasto list, and comes as five big prawns, looking good in their chargrilled treatment. They taste good, too, hot with chilli, not all bouncy with super-freshness but enjoyable and good - except for one problem, and that's the taste of the chargrill, which has left blackened bits on the prawns that make you think of the charred bits left on the barbie.

Spaghetti di maiala, or spaghetti with pork mince, chilli, garlic, basil and tomato ($19.50 entree, $27.50 main) is a very rustic, unadorned looking pile of spaghetti but is one we really like, with a kindof fatty lusciousness and an earthiness from the pork. Simple and perfectly good.

Risotto with dried porcini, white wine, parmesan and fresh herbs ($19.50 entree/$27.50 main) is a very big serve of risotto even in the entree size that we order. It's an intense risotto, pretty overwhelming on this score, with loads of mushrooms, which is a good thing, but also the taste of mushroom stock or shiitake powder or similar, which you feel could be dialled back a bit. This dish defeats us in its sheer power and solidity.

Cocktails and fresh juices admirably covered, but the wine list needs a polish up. Fundamentally, this is a good list with some very good wines - which is why we give it three stars. It's good to see the Italian varietals and some good wines in the (albeit short) Australian pinot, chardonnay and riesling lists. But it's disappointing to be provided with no vintages for most of the wines - other than the older premium reds. Perhaps we're meant to assume current vintage unless otherwise stated but vintage information is a pretty basic box to tick on a wine list. Ten Minutes by Tractor Pinot Noir, for example, is a good pinot and widely available in restaurants but the list doesn't say which of the pinots from this maker is offered, nor what year. The premium reds have a focus on Penfolds and you'll find three vintages of Grange here, among other premiums, four of which are offered by the glass, a 75ml or 150ml pour. They're not cheap but a bit of a treat, 2006 Penfolds Bin 407 among them.

We order a glass of prosecco and a Clare riesling ($10 a glass), from the Wilson Vineyard, although I'm not sure again whether this is the DJW or the Polish River Hill, and no bottle is produced to help. The glasses (generous pours) simply arrive with the wine in them. Both wines taste a little flat and less than fresh, and we ask for a new glass of prosecco, which comes with apologies. The two are chalk the cheese, the second glass lively and full of bubbles and clearly from a new bottle.

We get to dessert and are pausing over the menu when the waiter mentions Mama Tosolini, which gets our immediate attention. She makes the tiramisu, he says, and the cannoli, neither of which are on the dessert menu but both of which are in the cakes cabinet. We get both. The cannoli are okay, the pastry less than delicate, but the tiramisu is an instant favourite and the kind of thing that stays in your mind, a dish that you would want each time you visited. It's a super-rich and even sticky kind of tiramisu, filling, just the right amount of moistness, full of luxury and delicious.

We leave pretty buoyed, having had a good evening, despite issues with wine, and having been pretty well looked after. We really enjoyed much of the food and leave convinced that our strategy of going where Mama goes and ordering from the simple end of the menu is the way to go.

Score 14/20

Food: 3/4
Wine list: 3/4 
Service:   2/4
Style:  3/4
Value:  2/4

Scores out of four are a quick reference to key highs or lows. They do not relate directly to the score out of 20.