‘The best sandwich I’ve eaten all year’: Meaty spot enlivens a dead patch of Pyrmont

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I’m writing this from my home-office desk while wrestling with a sandwich the size of a house tile. It might be the best sandwich I’ve eaten all year.

Juicy slices of porchetta honking with black pepper and fennel. Bitter, sauteed leaves of curly endive scarola. Crunchy slices of blistered flatbread, pillow-soft in the middle to soak up all the good stuff. With every second bite, there’s a bit of frazzled crackling.

I’ll eat half now, half as a reward when I finish writing. I’m on deadline and I need to tell you about its maker, Salumeria Norcino.

Lazio-born mates Arnolfo Raimondi and Fabio Battisti opened the cafe, deli and restaurant in May last year, and it’s on that western edge of Pyrmont where you barely expect to find proof of life, let alone an $18 pizzetta sandwich like the one I’ve just put in the fridge.

Most of the smallgoods are made in-house, and there’s a bakery component, too. A Roman-style, whipped cream-filled maritozzo bun ($7.50) is exactly what you want to eat before strolling the Piazza di Spagna or Sydney Fish Market.

There’s also a smart little dining room, but almost no one sits in it, at least not on weekends when the sun’s out and there are free tables in the courtyard. A fortnight ago, it was packed with Italians dressed as if they were about to go yachting in Campania and a lot of the blokes could have doubled for Antonio Carluccio. A negroni is $20; tomato and mozzarella arancini are $7.50 each. If it weren’t for the Nova 96.9 building looming next door, you could almost be in some locals-only Salerno osteria.

Norcino partly came about because Battisti and Raimondi were frustrated with the quality of guanciale in Sydney and decided to make their own. Gnarly, discus-sized slabs of the cured pork jowl hang behind the counter, covered in salt and pepper and ready for their close-up in spaghetti carbonara ($38).

It’s one of nine pastas on the menu and carbonara diehards will be chuffed at Norcino’s rendering of the Roman icon, rich with pecorino and pasteurised egg yolks. Leave the bacon and cream for Americans and potato bake.

Amatriciana – Lazio’s other great guanciale-forward pasta – comes in the form of a $33 spaghetti. It’s fine, the jowl fat nicely incorporated into a tomato-heavy sauce, but I like amatriciana to have a more liberal approach to chilli.

Spaghetti vongole ($35) could also do with more kick, but you can bury me in the pork rib and sausage ragu that clings to the potato gnocchi ($28). Uncomplicated. Messy. Deep and red.

If your dining partner’s one of those annoying low-carb eaters, Norcino still has plenty of gear you can share. Best of the bunch is trippa alla Romana ($15/$28) – giving strips of honeycomb ox-tripe in a fruity, pecorino-enriched tomato sauce.

You can also get a mixed grigliata going with a pork sausage ($9), lamb chop ($15) and arrosticini skewer ($11). This will be a lot of meat-on-meat served with a disinterested clump of lettuce, but salsa verde is available on request; you’ll want to request it.

I’m a big fan of everything Salumeria Norcino – jack of all trades, master of salumi – is trying to do.

Also, the steaks. Options range from a $38 striploin to Mayura Station wagyu rib-eye for $280 a kilogram. On a recent Friday night visit, our table landed somewhere in the middle with a one-kilogram, $130 bone-in sirloin from O’Connor Beef in Gippsland. It was a barnstorming hunk of meat, pasture-raised and dry-aged for long, buttery flavour.

If I lived in one of those blue-chip Sydney Wharf apartments, I’d be chuffed to have these steaks within walking distance, plus a modest range of Tuscan reds around the $100 mark.

Don’t feel as if you need to gravitate to all this stuff to have a nice time, though. One chilled glass of Le Coste 2021 Litrozzo Rosso ($18) and a few cold cuts can be a delicious afternoon: blush-pink ribbons of the nitrate-free guanciale ($15); brawn-like coppa ($15) lifting pig nose, cheek and ears with bursts of lemon and orange zest; wagyu bresaola ($23) with a natural funk and more complexity than anything you’ll find in a packet at Harris Farm.

The service isn’t always as polished as other Italian joints around town, but I’m a big fan of everything Norcino – jack of all trades, master of salumi – is trying to do. Raimondi tells me there are plans to install a pizza oven in the courtyard and throw monthly parties with music and live art. Pyrmont residents and council, please let this happen. I’d demolish a whole pizza starring Norcino’s guanciale or a ricotta calzone topped with more of that porchetta. Speaking of, I have a date with a sandwich.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine