Testùn

The genre-bending, high-energy restaurant-wine bar from the team behind Threecoins & Sons keeps on keeping on.

There are your everyday Italian restaurants, and then there’s Testùn, an unabashed ‘neo-Italo’ rollercoaster specialising in taking cues from the motherland, then twisting them thoroughly, absolutely on their head. What’s impressive about the Testùn of today, though, is that the edges have been rounded, the execution refined.

There’s still clickbait for the mortadella generation, but the through-line is sound cooking, backed by smarts on the floor and a drinks offer that can stand up to it. And do not skip the mortadella, in one breath whipped and pumped over brioche toast, in the next, threaded onto a plus-sized skewer and char-grilled before being doused with buttermilk and capped with rubbly pistachio agrodolce. The rest doesn’t hold back either: mushrooms duxelles spread over a hash brown with taleggio; maccheroni turned through a soupy ragu of cotechino and cime di rapa then capped with breadcrumbs; Northern Rivers veal cotoletta drenched in Japanese curry sauce; brussels sprouts fried crisp and dressed with McDonald’s-inspired sauce. Pair it with decor that ties together lace, raw brick and tiles, add friends, add a negroni (there’s five), then dive into a wine list with an eye for ambers and chilled reds, and it all starts to make some kind of glorious sense. Never change.