Everything is in its right place at 10 William St

Bunnings is pushing potting mix, my wife is urging a cleanout of the pantry and the neighbours have installed a patio umbrella big enough to receive alien transmissions. After a stumble at the starting block, I think we can say spring has arrived.

This means it's time to do what I do every spring and visit 10 William St to eat broad beans. For more than a decade, the tiny bar and restaurant has been loved by Paddington locals for late-night natural wines and herby produce-first dishes that are like little postcards from the Ligurian coast.

One of my favourite meals of reliable memory is an early-October lunch here. There was bow-tie pasta with broad beans, green sauce and sugar-snap peas, followed by the world's rosiest roast lamb covered in just-wilted chicory. There was likely tiramisu, too, but what I remember is all that new-season produce bursting with flavour while the sun set and we drank Chartreuse into the night.

That was three years ago, when Trisha Greentree was leading the kitchen, and she's now at 10 William's older Potts Point sibling, Fratelli Paradiso. Can those verdant-spring heights be reached with Italian-born chef Francesco Ruggiero, who joined the team last month, now at the helm?

The menu remains mostly seasonally driven and is full of confident, wine-friendly flavours. Spindly spaghetti chitarra ($36) is rich with lamb ragu slow-cooked until it becomes rounder and smoother than a Koons balloon sculpture; zucchini flowers are lightly fried and covered in a blizzard of parmigiano ($14 each). There's focaccia ($6). There's salumi ($16). Everything is in its right place and every bit as swell as on my last few visits. Phew.

My legs are in the right place, too, thanks to a seat at the bar. While the upstairs dining area has room to stretch out, the chalkboard-chic ground floor has never been kind to the vertically blessed: the small tables are more cramped than cosy.

Another (now former) pain point was the non-bookings policy, which meant you had to rock up at 5pm for a table or end up putting your name on a list and waiting at the pub for a call. Post-COVID-19, owner-brothers Enrico and Giovanni Paradiso have set up an online booking system while still keeping half the tables for walk-in guests. Nice.

Anyway, where were we? Yes, spring. Green things, buzzing bees, hay fever and all that. Light and delicate farinata (a $28 kind-of-pancake thing made with chickpeas) is 10 Bill's sleeper hit of the season; it's draped with anchovies and piled high with mascarpone, parsley, chervil and chives. Submit to the urge to fold each quarter and eat it like floppy Naples pizza. 

Peppery kohlrabi remains on good form; Ruggiero serves ribbons of the turnip-ish brassica with paper-thin beurre bosc pear and more parsley, more chives ($25). Creamy buffalo milk blue cheese brings it all together, and it's lovely with a glass of refreshing 2021 Domaine de Selene Gamay Rosé ($18), from a four-hectare vineyard in Beaujolais.

The room is often half-full of drinks nerds sniffing rarities from their heroes of the natural wine world. If names such as Jean-Francois Ganevat, Sami-Odi and Paolo Bea get you hot and sweaty, you're probably reading this at 10 William St right now, glass of Dario Princic orange wine ($30) in hand. A charming team led by Jasmin Natterer can help the rest of us navigate the list and recommend daily-changing pours by the glass.

Garganelli pasta with cime de rapa and mussels ($35) sounds grand, but I'm a sucker for gnocchi, especially when it's lounging in a foamy, saucy mix of broad beans, pecorino and pistachio cream ($34). It's a shame the dish falls flat and needs sharpening with lemon rind or a liberal grating of parmigiano.

Pan-fried snapper ($36) is beautifully crisp-skinned and buttery, however, and comes circled by a ring of Brussels sprouts and bright-green baby broad beans still in the pod. 

We bypass the signature slab of tiramisu ($16) and finish with a slice of tart heavy with chocolate-hazelnut paste gianduja ($16), which is more or less Nutella for grown-ups. I'm a fan. 

That's one spring box ticked then, and I look forward to further visits when asparagus and globe artichokes are the best version of themselves. Now to plant some radish seeds, ogle jacarandas and complain about the parking in Bondi. Cleaning out the pantry can wait until summer.

Vibe: Late-night natural-wine clubhouse

Go-to dish: Farinata and anchovies ($28)

Drinks: One of the best lists of natural wines in town, plus delicious spritz and amaro options

Cost: About $170 for two, excluding drinks

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine