Attimi is the kind of restaurant you walk out of slightly altered. Dario Manca runs an intimate room in Paddington with a degustation that doesn't lecture you about ingredients, it just keeps presenting them in arrangements you didn't know to want. We were in for the long evening, and I'd happily book the same chair again next week.
The opener was charcoal QLD coral trout in a cardamom and prosciutto di Parma sauce, finished with grapefruit, chilli oil, fennel fronds and puffed fennel barley. Layered, delicate, and not at all the dish I'd expected to fall hardest for. Then a caviar bomb scampi crudo with potato cream, chives, yolk and carasau chips, the kind of plate that asks you to slow down before the next bite.
The housemade sourdough arrived with a butter infused with mussel. Yes, mussel. Briny, buttery, utterly addictive. I'd buy a jar if I could, no questions asked.
From there: a beef rump cap tartare under a black bagna cauda mayo with stracciatella, chilli oil, flatbread chard and pickled cocktail onions. Crispy potato layers in duck fat, smoked crème fraîche, chilli oil and chives. A carbonara burrata that puts the carbonara as a foam over Pecorino Romano cream with crispy guanciale. Game farm rabbit cavatelli with chestnut butter, goat cheese cream, caper leaves and a coffee jus that I am still thinking about. Attimi's Caesar salad to close the savoury run.
I was, by accident, the chief taster for a flight of experimental cocktails the team was working on. Reader, I did not refuse.
Why this is the highest die-happy score on the site
Mastery and die-happy don't always go together. A perfectly executed meal can leave you cold; a sloppy one can leave you in love. Attimi is the rare room where both numbers move together. The cooking is technically tight, every component pulling its weight, and the experience is generous enough, intimate enough, and a little playful enough that you walk out of dinner planning the next one.
Would I go back?
Already plotting it. If Brisbane has a finer Italian degustation right now, I haven't sat at it.