Generosity of Generations at Sardo
John Caruso discovers generous winter dishes at Sardo Noosa and a restaurateur with no patience for carb anxiety.
My father came from a fishing village in Sicily and made the trip to Australia in 1952, eventually building a life here with my mum, the daughter of Sicilian immigrants. Needless to say, our kitchen was always filled with the aromas of great meals being prepared – oxtail ragù, handmade pork and fennel sausages and whatever fish had filled my father’s basket earlier in the day – bream, whiting, mackerel. The case for any dish was simply that it had fed people who mattered and continued to do so.
Sicily and Sardinia are two islands separated from the Italian mainland by the Tyrrhenian Sea. Island food carries an understanding that the sea provides and the land supplements. Bread is treated not as a side, but as a tool and this kind of cooking has no interest in explaining itself.
Danny Isaac arrived in Australia as a four-year-old, his family relocating from Sardinia in the late 1980s. He’s been in the food business long enough that the dishes on his menu are not concepts, they’re memories. When I spoke with Danny at Sardo Noosa, the restaurant he co-owns with Stefano Rassu, I mentioned my background. He nodded and went straight to the sausages.
“Pork with fennel and chilli. We pull them apart and make a red sauce ragù with the Malloreddus pasta,” he explains, making my mouth water.
Malloreddus is a traditional Sardinian pasta made with saffron, pressed into small, ridged shells built to hold sauce the way pasta should. At Sardo Noosa, Malloreddus Sausage Ragù has been on the menu since opening and has not moved since. Danny’s description of it is the most useful endorsement any dish is likely to receive: “That dish is like Vegemite on toast,” he says. “It’s anytime pasta. Any time of the day, if you’re hungry, you eat it. It’s not something you need to feel like. It’s just automatic.”
The ragù is deliberately spare. Not many ingredients, Danny says, but a lot of time. The pork and fennel sausages are dismantled and cooked down into a red sauce that carries heat from the chilli, the fennel threading through with persistence. Simple done properly is a different thing from simple done carelessly, and this dish has been on enough tables long enough that the difference shows.
It is one of three dishes Danny considers winter’s best at Sardo Noosa. The second is a rigatoni with slowcooked lamb neck ragù, taggiasca olives and aged pecorino.
“Sixteen hours, beer braised. Rich, heavy flavours. That’s a proper winter dish,” he says.
The rigatoni earns its selection here. The ridged tubes and hollow centre are built for a sauce this substantial, capturing the braised meat rather than letting it slip past. The taggiasca olives hold a small briny edge against the richness of the neck, and the aged pecorino cuts through the fat with some authority. It is a serious plate, designed to be eaten with bread – though at Sardo Noosa, that applies to everything.
The third dish is the one that stops conversation. The Fish Stew carries Moreton Bay bug, prawns, calamari, barramundi and mussels in a fresh tomato and lobster bisque that would be considerable on its own. But the kitchen seals it under a pizza dough lid and finishes it in the oven. It arrives looking like a handsome, heavy pie, the lid is opened in front of you, and the steam rises from the bowl theatrically.
“Piping hot, perfect in winter, with beautiful seafood flavours,” says Danny.
For men whose families came from an island that understand seafood better than most of the Italian mainland, the dish is perfection. Our parents believed that the ocean gave you mostly what you needed, your job is to not overcomplicate it. The fish stew achieves this. Which brings Danny to his only real philosophical position: “Cutlery.” he will tell you, “is a luxury.”
The pizza dough lid exists to be eaten. It is not a presentation device. It is an instrument for finishing what is in the bowl beneath it, and he is watching to make sure it gets used.
“We say to customers when we serve it that we’re not taking the plate away until all that bread’s gone,” he says. “It’s got to get messy. Scarpetta! Clean up the plate. That’s what it’s all about.”
For anyone raised in an Italian household, none of this requires explanation. Leaving sauce in a bowl with bread on the table is not restraint, it is waste. The bread is how you finish the sentence that the sauce started. Danny knows that not everyone arrives with this appreciation, especially those who believe that carbohydrates are the enemy.
“We eat bread with bread!” Danny exclaims.
It is not a slogan. It is a description of how the kitchen at Sardo Noosa works, and how food has worked in the households that produced these dishes long before they appeared on any menu.
The Malloreddus ragù was a childhood memory for Danny before it was ever a dish for sale; the fish stew carries Sardinia’s seafood instinct through generations and onto a local table; and the lamb neck is comfort food at its best. Slow and indulgent, prepared for the cooler months ahead.
My parents have passed on so I miss the homemade pork and fennel sausages, however I know a place where the same philosophies still exist: feeding people that matter.
Discover more of the true essence of Italy and Sardo’s homestyle goodness…
