Climb the stairway to Italian snacking heaven at Balwyn’s Enoteca Boccaccio

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From where I’m sitting, it’s equal parts community service and canny business decision for a beloved Mediterranean grocer to launch an eat-in option.

And where I’m sitting is on a bar stool at Enoteca Boccaccio. It’s rather uncomfortable – did no one do a simple 90-minute road test before unleashing them on the public? – but that’s the only real complaint I have about this little gem of a place.

The backstory starts with the D’Anna family’s primo Balwyn wine store and grocer, Boccaccio Cellars. Over the past 60 years, it has grown into the kind of place where the air is edible with the fug of maturing cheese and no customer leaves without straying beyond their shopping list.

Now the temptation continues after hours at their schmick new wine bar, which packs the good looks and unproblematic appeal that’s seen The Boot overrun with so many tourists that locals have the gall to complain about it.

I suspect a good proportion of Balwyn is currently lolling on a sun lounger next to the Med, but for anyone not ’gramming from Polignano a Mare or Positano, there are now plenty of consolations at the top of a steep flight of pink marble stairs on Burke Road.

The looks are old school, in the way that you’ll immediately relate to the formula of cheese wheels and salumi arranged like religious relics behind a central bar, where chefs work the slicer and shuck the oysters (and if you don’t respond to this in a Pavlovian sense, I recommend you immediately get checked for a pulse).

It’s squeezy, with a handful of marble-topped tables arranged along the walk-through, while the dining room proper is more of a glorified alcove decked out in soft furnishings and mood lighting, but it just adds to that thrilling sense of whatever the opposite of FOMO is.

The story goes that Enoteca Boccaccio was intended as a salumi bar before being upscaled, and you could happily sit with a plate of waxy capocollo or softly luscious jamon Iberico before heading on your way.

But there’s plenty of stickiness to keep you in place. Fried green olives stuffed with mortadella ($14) will do the trick; so will a fat green pepper that’s been blistered on the hibachi, topped with a smoked anchovy and dabbed with the cut-through of preserved lemon (the good stuff, not its overbearingly medicinal evil twin).

Considered together, they’re the flip sides of a menu from Andrew Beddoes (ex-Tartine and Richmond’s The Grand) that knows when to go the full nonna and when to raise the bar.

Even in the latter case, there’s nothing too fussy to impede the ballsy enjoyment of charry octopus ($27) with a thickened almond sauce the menu calls ajo blanco and oil spiked with Espelette pepper, or duck livers ($25), their iron tang mollified by a whack of balsamic and the gelatinous sweetness of slow-roasted, fall-apart white onions.

Chef Andrew Beddoes knows when to go the full nonna and when to raise the bar

There’s pasta, of course. Veal agnolotti ($35) are a model of the form, their egg-yellow dough filled with a meat farce bright with aromatics, swimming in a clean but big-flavoured chicken broth.

Mains? If you’re not in the mood for a $150 spend on a bistecca alla fiorentina, you’re left with the sea bream ($50) – no great hardship when the springy-fleshed fillet sitting alongside a charry hunk of cabbage crowned with roughly chopped clams shows how a winter seafood dish should be done.

I’m doing Boccaccio a disservice by acknowledging the wine list this late. Manifesting the cellar downstairs, it’s a sophisticated read that draws a line between Italy and Oz and adds a Coravin section that puts some serious pours in the reach of mortals.

By the glass is the way to go if you fancy kicking off with an aged German riesling – ripe with that telltale note of kerosene, it covers both octopus and duck livers with a sly grin – and moving on to a velvety ’16 barolo. The brilliant staff are armed with both knowledge and generosity (half-pours are a possibility if you ask nicely.)

A few things miss the mark by a smidge. The sea bream could have donated some of its salt to the gnocchi in burnt butter and sage sauce. Ordering sparkling water shouldn’t mean a bottle of San Pellegrino arrives to mess with your food mile chakras. Having to ask for parmesan to go with your pasta is a breach of several international treaties.

But, you know, small birra. The case for the defence can simply point to the lemon tart ($18) and I’ll stand down. Pouting at diners from the counter like Gina Lollobrigida, it’s a thing of lusty beauty that hovers between liquid and solid and packs a mouth-puckering acid punch. It’s what you (or at least I) want in a dessert at an enoteca that’s only been open a few weeks but is channelling 60 years of Italian food wisdom.

It’s so good it even made me forget about the bar stools.