Get Sashimi
I was twelve, somewhere in the Roman countryside on a European summer. My dad had somehow arranged a cooking class with an Italian family we’d never met. We were collected at a train station by a woman in a battered old car who drove like the concept of road rules was a mild suggestion. We stopped on the side of the road to pull warm figs straight off a tree, then climbed a narrow road into a village that felt suspended between the 1970s and forever. Inside their house we made fresh pasta, a proud, slow-cooked Bolognese, veal cutlets, antipasti that kept arriving like reinforcements, and a cheesecake that still sits in my memory as the high-water mark. The food tasted of generosity. The people felt like family. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.
Sydney’s Italian food scene does not make the chase easy. Leichhardt, Haberfield, Five Dock, the standards are set high and the competition is ruthless. You can trip over a decent carbonara on almost any corner. So when TikTok started screaming about Totti’s, first Bondi, then Rozelle, then the city, I approached with the healthy suspicion of someone who has seen too many influencer temples that serve more selfies than soul.
The first visit was a table of six and, for a while, it almost worked. The room had that warm, slightly chaotic energy that good Italian places should have. The hospitality was genuine. We ordered the “holy trinity”: wood-fired bread still blistering from the oven, vine tomatoes, fresh burrata, and 18-month prosciutto. The bread was excellent. Hot, fragrant, the kind that makes you forgive a lot. The ragu was better still: proper al dente pasta, meat that had been treated with respect, sauce that tasted of time rather than shortcuts. The tiramisu that followed was balanced, not cloying, not bitter, just right, though the almond snowstorm on top felt like someone had gotten carried away with the garnish. We were full, happy, and then the bill arrived.
Let’s talk about the numbers, because they matter. Nineteen-fifty for bread. Seventeen-fifty for tomatoes. Nineteen-fifty for a single ball of burrata. Twenty-nine dollars for a portion of prosciutto that looked like it had been measured with a jeweller’s scale. Eighty-five dollars before anyone had ordered a main. By the time dessert and drinks were added the total sat somewhere north of eight hundred for six people. That’s not a meal. That’s a down payment. The food was good. It was not eight-hundred-dollars good. Once the novelty wore off you were left with the uncomfortable realisation that you’d paid fine-dining money for very competent trattoria cooking.
Years later I went back, this time to the city restaurant with my sister for her birthday. We planned the order with military precision because the memory of the first bill still stung. Bread (compulsory), tuna crudo, ragu to share, frangipane tart from the specials, and another tiramisu. The service had the slightly frantic air of a place that has taken one more booking than it can comfortably handle. We waited an uncomfortably long time to order, longer still for the food, and eventually ran out of conversation and started discussing the weather like hostages.
The crudo was a disappointment, more an idea of fish than the thing itself, a thin smear on a flavourless cracker with an even thinner gesture of mascarpone. The bread was still good. The ragu, again, delivered: soft, deeply flavoured, the kind of dish that reminds you why Italian food can be transcendent when someone actually cares. Then came the long wait for dessert, followed by the sudden efficiency of the EFTPOS machine appearing while we were still mid-spoon. The table was being reset before we’d properly stood up. The birthday tart arrived with a candle and zero theatrical singing, which I appreciated, but the pastry was thick and the rhubarb aggressively sour. The tiramisu remained the strongest player on the dessert list.
Here’s the honest scorecard. Totti’s can cook. The wood-fired bread is worth ordering. The ragu is properly made. Some of the pasta shapes on the menu will send you to Google: bucatini, paccheri, gnocchetti, but the kitchen understands sauce and texture. The problem is not competence. The problem is the gap between the experience and the price tag, and the way the place leans into the very hype it simultaneously has to live up to. When a restaurant is this heavily promoted, every plate is carrying the weight of expectation. Most of them can’t quite bear it once the influencer glow fades.
I would go back. On a special occasion, with a clear budget and lowered expectations about value, yes. As a regular? No. There are too many places in this city that deliver the same warmth and better honesty for less money. Totti’s is not a fraud. It is simply not the revelation the algorithm keeps insisting it is. The best Italian meals I’ve had in Sydney still taste a little more like that Roman kitchen, generous, unpretentious, and somehow cheaper than they have any right to be.
