Bar Benevento

Bar Benevento Sydney — a buzzing Campanian coffee and pasta bar from the de Vine family

The corner of Kent and Bathurst has picked up a distinctly southern Italian accent. Bar Benevento is the new all-day coffee and pasta bar from brothers Anthony and Julian Izzillo, the pair behind long-running city wine bar de Vine, with cafe operator Kosta Papanikitas and co-owner and head chef Tim Fisher also on board. It's named for the small Campanian city where the brothers' father was born, and the room leans right into it: retro Benevento posters on the windows, old-school tunes keeping the tempo up, deli goods on the shelves and a giant bottle of Strega greeting you at the door. The family has even secured exclusive import rights to ten styles of the town's famous liqueur.

Breakfast is where Fisher makes his opening statement. The limited-run breakfast raviolo is a single oversized parcel of ricotta and egg yolk under Strega hollandaise and pancetta, while the breakfast antipasto lines up pork sausage, bacon, a six-minute egg and Strega-cured salmon. The cannoli skip the sweet route entirely, with crisp shells filled with truffle mortadella, provola and ricotta. Come lunch, house-made pasta takes over, including a daily pick from Campania's forgotten repertoire and rigatoni with slow-cooked beef ragù and caciocavallo, alongside warm, soft taralli for dipping and schiacciata panini like the house Benevento with cotechino and peperonata.

Espresso is best taken standing at the bar, the way it's done back home, but nobody will blink if you move on to something stronger. The morning cocktail list runs from a Strega-spiked mimosa to an espresso martini riff with nocino, the amaro selection nods to de Vine's famous collection, and the all-Italian wine list covers all twenty regions with a lean to the south and prices written straight onto the bottles. It's breakfast and lunch only for now, with dinner on the cards in the coming months.