This was published 7 years ago
Abbondante restaurant in Windsor serves up plenty of good times
By Dani Valent
Abbondante
★★★☆
268 HIGH STREET, WINDSOR, 9529 6121
LICENSED; BYO MC V EFTPOS
TUESDAY-SUNDAY 6PM-11PM
SMALL: $16-$23; LARGE: $29-$39; CHEF'S SELECTION: $55
There's plenty to like at Abbondante in Windsor.Credit: Wayne Taylor
What is a restaurant for anyway? Abbondante answers the question in a most congenial way. Restaurants aren't there to bestow calories. Sustenance is easy: food can be clunked from freezer to microwave, delivered by bike, dispensed from vans, plucked from the vegetable patch, even bought from a market and cooked. We don't need restaurants to feed us, we need them because of how they – hopefully – make us feel.
Abbondante (it means "abundant" in Italian) is clear about its mission: creating a light-hearted space for grown-up good times. No queues. Not too loud but not pious either. And despite all the things it isn't, it's infused with a say "yes" mentality that means you can have your own type of night out (boozy or Dry July, restrained or lavish, romantic or boisterous) and not be boxed into the restaurant's own vision. Or, rather, the Abbondante vision encompasses all of the above and then some.
Rockling fish.Credit: Wayne Taylor
The food is just one more missive of care, sort of southern Italian but not slavishly so, thoughtful and well-rendered without crying out for heaps of attention or memory-banking.
The menu morphs daily. Gold-edged pan-fried gnocchi are tossed with asparagus, pine nuts, garlic and blue cheese; they are just as you'd want them, gold-edged and proudly potato-y without being stodgy.
Duck breast is cooked to a happy pink and sliced over mushroom and sage risotto. Barramundi is laid over soupy fregola (the Sardinian version of cous cous); flake the fillet to create a pleasant peasant fish stew. Eggplant parmigiana – part of a lavish, comfort-focused antipasti – turns eggplant, cheese, tomato and oven alchemy into an intense slice of contentment.
Owners Hershy Ash (Casa Ciuccio, Bar Lourinha) and Dino Esposito (Da Noi) are experienced front-of-house guys, adept at steering a room towards conviviality. They opened last May, around the corner on Chapel Street, as a sharing-economy experiment with Plenty cafe.
Pumpkin, sage and feta gnocchi.Credit: Wayne Taylor
Plenty ran the days, Abbondante the evenings and it more or less worked until the cafe shut shop. Abbondante stuck it for a while but the amenities of a new building on High Street (Proper wiring! New pipes!) turned out to be more of a drawcard than Windsor's passing trade.
The new digs aren't immediately atmospheric but the owners are all about the story: the lamps lining the bar are a relic from Ash's lamp-loving grandfather (or maybe they just look nice). The black and white photos on the wall were found in a suitcase at a Paris flea market (or maybe they just look cool). It doesn't really matter because being here feels good and that's the most appetising element of all.
Abbondante offers a light-hearted space for grown-up good times.Credit: Wayne Taylor