Mascot's Dirty Italian Disco breaks all the rules

There are so many rules being broken here at Mr Liquor's Dirty Italian Disco that you can almost hear them falling to the floor like tinkling glass.

Permanence is one – this is a six-month summertime pop-up from the Merivale Group, who own the adjoining pub.

Convention is another. Normally when you go to a restaurant, it's in a building. This one is in the covered driveway of a bottle shop, with roller doors at either end and a flashy disco ball hanging overhead.

It's chockers with long share tables, mismatched chairs and a wood-fired oven called "disco inferno". Music clips are screened against one wall, karaoke kicks in late on Friday and Saturday nights, and the walls are tattooed by artist Rick Vaughn, who usually works with skin.

Then there's the wine list. There is no wine list. Instead, you have to wander around the bloody cold bottle shop coolroom risking hypothermia (clever people don the supplied puffer jackets first).

Order a G-and-T, and the gin comes in a miniature bottle, as if on an airline. Order a "communal Negroni" and it comes pre-batched in a flip-top bottle, enough for two.

As for the chefs, Pinbone team's Mike Eggert and Jemma Whiteman, together with front-of-house Berri Eggert, continue their now-chronic habit of pushing creative boundaries until they very nearly – but don't – burst.

They call this their version of an American red-sauce joint but it ain't. There's nothing Tony Soprano, Frankie Sinatra or chicken parma about Dirty Italian.

Instead, it's all about the raw and the wood-fired, with a range of bruschetta, pasta, grills and vegetable sides sent out on enamel tin plates. If anything, it's a green-sauce joint, with its seasonality, direct cooking and clean flavours.

A starter of beetroot and raw tuna with a squish of horseradish cream ($17) sings, as does bruschetta topped with beautifully seasoned raw veal with a swipe of tuna cream ($12), like steak tartare on toast.

Pappardelle​ with a green vegetable ragu ($23) seems a mismatch, the pasta too thick and tough for its light velvety sauce, but gnocchetti sardi  ($24) is mighty. The ridged-beetle pasta, rolled from an eggless dough using semolina instead of flour, picks up the shreddy braised lamb and toasty crumbs in its curves so that every mouthful is texture-bending.

There's a very satisfying, slow-cooked version of porchetta ($28) that's more like a roll of cured, honey-glazed ham, sliced and served with a mess of charred spring onions on a metal tray.

Also good: slashes of poached-then-grilled beef tongue dressed with dried porcini, fresh shiitake and confit tomato ($16); a smart, clean salad of bitter leaves and pecorino ($12); and a spiffing strawberry swirl soft-serve with mixed nut praline ($8). The only dull dish is the one closest to American red-sauce cooking – a crumbly meatloaf ($16), pasty with tomato.

Franck Moreau's wine selection is big on minimal intervention, with likeable drops such as a fresh and fragrant 2017 Ochota Barrels Greenroom Grenache Syrah ($69) from McLaren Vale winemaker Taras Ochota.

Dirty Italian raises a finger to the conventions of the restaurant industry, but that same finger is pointing the way forward, as more smart operators dial down on labour costs and dial up the fun in unique and original spaces. Rules, schmools.

The lowdown

Vegetarian One bruschetta, one pasta – but you could make a top meal of the six well-crafted sides.

Drinks Pre-batch negronis, Moretti on tap, serve-yourself wines from bottle shop and cool room.

Go-to dish Porchetta with charred scallions, $28.

Pro tip It's still a bottle-shop – every bottle is available to take home, for 20 per cent less.