Bill and Toni's Restaurant

74 Stanley Street EAST SYDNEY 2000
PHONE 93604702

Review originally posted on the 21st of January 2003

I sat inside Bill 'n Toni’s restaurant and looked along Stanley Street. The inheritance of bistro warmth has evolved comprehensively from Italian immigrants and boarding-house accommodation. The former reinvented the later with amiable savvy, and have stuck around to keep an eye on their work.

The vibrancy of the precinct remains, and the youthful fusion is co-dependent with the graceful Neapolitans. It’s kind of like that friend’s place you always hang around on Sundays. All black tee shirts, studded-belts, and low-slung bass guitars. Then the landlord comes around to collect the rent and joins you in a beer.

I’d nabbed a balcony table and received the reverential bread and supplementary flagon of cordial. Today it’s pineapple.

The dishes tend towards simplicity and prices are on the side of the customer. An assembled medley of pasta or meat cuts satisfies local devotees. The straightforwardness of napolitana or bolognaise stay unembellished save for your choice of spaghetti or penne. Schnitzel comes with cheese and there’s scaloppini pizzaola or else meatballs. Otherwise roast chicken or veal grills including fish, sausages, beef fillet and a pork chop. An ensemble of pasta and any main costs fourteen dollars. A starter of pasta followed by a main is eighteen. Pasta or soup alone is only eight. Seven day trading of lunch and dinner and a brief hiatus between resets indicate enough flow to keep things unsullied.

Aww shucksie service, like '80s stadium rock, is altogether avoided. Mr. Caesar downstairs pulls majestic coffee for the mix of gym heads, suits and young icehouse flowers that have probably just rolled out of bed. They all troop in, so after eating submerge and absorb yourself into the atmosphere.

The street’s manifold kitchens - and I’ve worked out front of three of 'em - suggest a renaissance designed to please the customer and not guide books or egomaniacal chefs. Food described as courteous must therefore uphold a notion that customers are not unwitting exhibits in an impromptu performance. Do I have to write the next line?