Charisma, welcome, utility and fun: The new Perth restaurant that has ‘It’

There’s a new guy on the block at the top end of Beaufort Street Perth and it’s pretty much the perfectly formed restaurant. And bar. And providore.

Tom’s is light, bright and airy. Food is ordered at the counter from scores of display platters inside a refrigerated cabinet. There’s also a cheese display full to the brim with high-end French and British cheeses and a few Aussies too. There are shelves of produce, from which, we’re assured, punters are buying, sometimes hundreds of dollars of sauces, dressings, condiments, pastas and tinned goods, as they leave.

Tom’s has “it”: that hard to define combination of charisma, welcome, utility and fun. For a business that has been open only a few weeks, it has an air of professionalism and control. Essentially it’s a dine-in deli with a liquor licence and a shop: a sophisticated take on a trendy New York deli bar in one of NYC’s better neighbourhoods. It has footpath dining, large spaces inside, golden-hued timber floors, Rodeo Drive-style awnings out front, marble counters and pale cream and white interiors.

If Tom’s doesn’t go off like a frog in a sock this summer, we’ll be very surprised.

And somehow it doesn’t matter that you go to the deli counter and order your food. That’s just the way it is and we’re happy to comply.

It matters though that the pasta dishes, once ordered from the glass fronted display, are whizzed off to the kitchen for a re-heat. Re-heated pasta is hardly its highest calling, although, to be fair, lasagne is one pasta dish which responds very well to a second cook. Not so sure about cannelloni, because, no matter how good the cookery is and the flavours are, reviving precooked pasta in the oven is like applying the cardio paddles to a long dead heart attack patient. Having said that, the dishes we ate were darn good. I was listening for the ping of a microwave. No luck, but the dishes came out very fast. Temperature-wise, both pastas arrived tepid, but the quality of the pasta dough and the sauces were plain to see and taste.

The Bolognese sauce on the lasagne was a star, but why so much of it? “Proper” lasagne relies on just a smear of meat sauce and bechamel between each pasta layer. It is a tall, multi-layered construction that holds together like a solid, tender brick of sauce-stained pasta.

Tom’s owners, brother and sister team Tom and Lara Lukich, are generous, smart people who love feeding their guests, which may account for the Bolognese over-reach which renders the dish sloppy and falling apart. They are also feeding Australians and for many locals an oversupply of meat sauce represents value and, as some are wont to say, a bloody good feed mate. Oh, and – I’m sorry, I realise I’m sounding like a nag now, but these things are important – get rid of the thick layer of cheese on top. Within seconds of it landing on the plate, the stretchy, melty cheese cooled into an unappetising slab of rubbery protein, difficult to cut and virtually devoid of flavour. It was about as welcome as Kanye at a bar mitzvah. Lasagne is best eaten with a ladle of fresh, zingy tomato sugo poured over the top before it is committed to the oven for reheating. All that’s needed then is a dusting of parmesan to garnish. Job done. Costs reduced. Better eating.

Tom’s mushroom arancini was the very height of arancini cooking and a fair dinkum mouthgasm: no gluggy, gluey centre, no limp, greasy crumbed outer and definitely no icky, overcooked vegetable chunks, just good rice, lightly bound in its own sauce and scented with bold mushroom flavours, a hint of rehydrated porcini mushroom and a whiff of thyme. It was cheesy too, but not over the top (thank god, we’re not Americans after all). One of the finest arancini we’ve had in a long time … and that includes Sicily, the home of arancini, where we were a couple of months ago. The arancini come with a small salad on the plate, more of a garnish really. Why? The leaves were very nice though.

A house made pork and bacon sausage roll came from the cabinet. Its filling was rustic and toothsome and, again, ping-ponging around your mouth with raunchy flavour and good seasoning. The buttery, flaky pastry was next-level good.

All the dishes we tried had that unmistakable homemade flavour from a kitchen which clearly knows how to excite customers.

The Lukich siblings have put together a new enterprise with energy, style and attention to detail. It’s also a point of difference. There aren’t many of these deli/bar/restaurant businesses around town. We can easily see ourselves whiling away afternoons at Tom’s, smashing a few Aperol spritzes and then leaning into their good wine list.

Marvellous.