The celebrated chef has settled in to the revamped Bar Carolina in South Yarra, serving creative takes on broadly Italian food mixed with comforting classics.
Italian$$
Chef, author and TV presenter Karen Martini has landed in a restaurant that feels so right it makes her wonderfully deft cooking taste even better. No wonder the place was humming from day one. It comes after an unfortunate double whammy from her two previous projects: Hero at Federation Square didn’t quite fly and closed suddenly in 2023, then Saint George in St Kilda stuttered due to landlord machinations and never reopened after Christmas 2024.
Bar Carolina is a simpler proposition: a well-loved venue on an iconic strip in a blue-chip postcode where people don’t mind spending. The restaurant first opened in 2017, a corner site with a long dining room, lovely natural light and a sleek fitout.
A few months back, original owner Joe Mammone was chatting to Martini about the Carolina menu (they share a hairdresser). The conversation escalated and, short weeks later, Martini, her husband, Michael Sapountsis, and old mate and savvy hospo guy Rabih Yanni, publican of nearby Botanical Hotel, got the keys. They turned the place around in seven days – a lick of paint, new furniture – and reopened it like a dam wall, watching South Yarra wash in, all shiny and thirsty. People are here for spritzes and snacks, pinot and pasta, syrah and steak.
They’re here because it’s bursting with new energy, fizzing with ideas. They’re here because they’re looked after by pros like Sapountsis and serial restaurateur Simon Denton (ex-Izakaya Den), both of whom can steer you towards the right wine and leave you feeling smart for just saying yes.
Karen Martini’s broadly Italian food is so attractive and straight-up tasty that you don’t always realise how thoughtful, technically adept and seasonally expressive it is. To make the pesce crudo, lightly cured tuna is dressed with nut milk squeezed from toasted almonds and an emulsion made from the brine drained from green olives. There’s extra flavour and texture from celery leaves, tarragon, green chilli and lemon zest. Burrata is suddenly ubiquitous, but the milky, oozy knot is exciting here, served over sweet-tart fennel marmellata with pine nuts and coriander seeds for texture and dimension.
Do you know why god gave us carbs? So we can eat Martini’s cappelletti, a filled pasta that means “little hats”. Perfectly plump, stuffed with four cheeses and a touch of toasty breadcrumb, they’re perched on verdant cavolo nero purée with a splodge of parmigiano fondue and topped with burnt-butter sage and hazelnuts.
The creative juices are clearly flowing but if a dish ain’t broke, it ain’t fixed. In the late 1990s, Martini served salt-crusted steak at St Kilda’s Melbourne Wine Room. (To be precise, it was rib-eye for $18.) Nearly 30 years later, she’s still patting steak with a thick layer of sea salt and a tickle of pepper and cooking it – here in a wood oven so the salt chars and the meat turns to smoky, juicy perfection. Desserts aren’t complicated because delight doesn’t need to be: the bignè is a dressed-up eclair layered with cherries in syrup, white chocolate cream and blackberries.
If Bar Carolina is good now – and, oh boy, is it! – even more fun times are coming with the imminent reopening of next door’s Tetto di Carolina, an upstairs bar strong on salty snacks. Extending the hours to all-day-everyday is also planned. “I want it to be one of those places that you know is open,” Martini tells me. “We’ll be there.”
The low-down
Atmosphere: Glittering, see-and-be-seen vibe.
Go-to dishes: Four cheese cappelletti ($41); tuna crudo ($28); steak (from $68); bignè cream puff ($22).
Drinks: This is spritz central but when you move onto wine, there’s an excellent one-page list of food-friendly by-the-glass options with a leaning to Italian varietals. The bottle list leads off with an approachable range of “vino preferiti” (favourites) then continues with a splashier nine-page catalogue.
Cost: About $180 for two, excluding drinks.
This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine.
Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.
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