Torrisi, Carbone and Chang at 2012 Melbourne Food & Wine Festival

07 March 2012 to 07 March 2012

<b>Viva Little Italy</b><br>
New York’s Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone cooking with David Chang is sure to be the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival’s hottest ticket.

First came Momofukurage, when outraged food-fans couldn’t get tickets to David Chang’s dinner at Cumulus Inc. during the 2010 Melbourne Food & Wine Festival. And now here comes Torrisi-gate – unless you grab tickets straightaway for what’s certain to be the hottest of this year’s festival dinners. Chang is back in Melbourne, and he’s teaming up with Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone, the chefs behind New York sensation Torrisi Italian Specialties.

Torrisi Italian wha? Until November last year the deli-sized shopfront of Torrisi pumped with orders for epic hero sandwiches by day and a prix fixe Italian-American menu by night, but with the November opening of Parm – the team’s new spin-off on Mulberry Street in the Little Italy neighbourhood – there’s a new $125 tasting menu on offer.

At Parm the duo continue to deliver the red-sauce classics in all their glory, the likes of sausage and peppers and – you bet – eggplant parm, not remixed or deconstructed, but simply made with care and topnotch ingredients. “It’s Italian-American food first and foremost,” says Carbone, “made using Italian techniques and philosophies, but American ingredients.”

At Torrisi, broccoli rabe is fermented in the style of kimchi, and breadsticks become the coating for juicy fillets of fish; littleneck clams sautéed in chilli and garlic top salami-bread crostini, while Jersey-style peppers become the base of a vinaigrette for a green-bean antipasto dish.

Carbone and Torrisi fine-tuned their skills at considerably grander restaurants (Mario Batali’s Del Posto and Daniel Boulud’s Café Boulud among them), and part of the pleasure of dinner is seeing them apply said skills to menus that reflect their upbringing.

It’ll be the first time in Australia for the two young chefs, and they’re “super-excited” about the visit. The menu is yet to be decided, as is only proper for these green-market devotees, but Chang says the night will “involve lots of us making fun of each other, that I can guarantee you”. With MoVida providing a fittingly snug setting, it promises to be a lively night.

“We want people to get a good, clear sense of our sensibilities, but at the same time, we really want to use Australian products,” says Carbone. “We’re all about making Italian food with what’s around you, and for the three days we’re cooking in Melbourne, we’ll have a whole new set of ingredients around us.”

So they’ll be Italo-Australo-Korean-Americans for the night? “Yeah – what could be better than that?”

Join us for dinner with Mario Carbone, Rich Torrisi and David Chang at 6.30pm on Wednesday 7 March at MoVida, 1 Hosier La, Melbourne. For bookings, call MoVida on (03) 9663 3038. Tickets are $200, including matched wines by the glass. For more information on the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival, visit melbournefoodandwine.com.au.