With a capacity of just 50 diners and ‘fancy goon’ on the menu, Perth bar and restaurant, Testun, provides an intimate setting for irreverent takes on Italian food and drink.
Katia Taschetti, Venue Manager and Co-Owner of Testun, explained that although Testun is a new bar, the staff’s roots in hospitality go back a long way.
“I was working in hospitality in Italy as well, and then when I finished uni and we moved to Australia about ten years ago, I started to work in hospitality full time back in Melbourne,” Katia says.
“We decide to move [to Perth] because my husband’s family decided to move here from Italy as well, to open a family restaurant.”
Katia’s husband is Frank Trequattrini, a native of Umbria and one of the chefs at Testun. Another of the chefs is Chris Caravella, who came on-board after Katia and Frank decided to move on from the café concept they had operated on the site from 2017.
“Chris’s family has a very long history in hospitality, they had one of the restaurants in Fremantle that’s been family-owned for over 65 years.”
Nevertheless, Testun is not a nostalgic venue looking to recreate the family-run, red-chequered Italian restaurants of the past. Rather, Katia and company are looking to challenge preconceptions of what Italian food and drink can be.
“For us it’s been really about wanting to open something that is a fully owner-operated kitchen with a focus on putting fun and youth back into the Italian dining scene, which is maybe a little bit stale,” Katia explains.
“It’s a group of like-minded Italian and Italo-Australian people coming together and really wanting to create a place where the casual and spontaneous ‘anything goes’ vibe of Italian culture, while trying to strip away the conventions around Italian food traditions.
“To try instead a richer experience, that goes beyond the idea of just a wine bar as exclusively just a place to drink wine.”
One way Testun does this is by focusing on local and low intervention wines, with Katia saying there’s “a very interesting, very good wine scene here in WA.”
“We’ve got a lot of low intervention wines, we try to look for mostly honest wines – that would be, expressions of the terroir, of the wine-making process and the people behind it,” Katia continues.
And with Italian wines, the team are “pretty much looking at lesser known regions or indigenous grapes that are made in a unique style, but that can still represent the range of soils and climates that Italy has.”
One of the more subversive items on the menu is ‘fancy goon’ – high quality wines served by the glass or by the carafe from bag ‘casks’.
“There’s a lot of other venues doing it, but maybe it’s not stated. We do it right on the menu, with a strong emphasis that we like to do that,” Katia explains.
“It’s very simple, genuine and honest drinking, and it makes an affordable choice for the customers.”
“At the end of the day, the perception that we’re trying to shift is that goon is not a type of wine – it’s a packaging. The bag can be filled with any type of wine. It’s sort of like what happened to the screw tops, where it used to be impossible to think of as very good quality, but now you find top quality wines [in screw top bottles],” Katia adds.
Alongside the selection of Italian and Australian wines, Testun has a small list of cocktails, based on housemade spirit infusions.
“We cannot distil, but what we are trying to do more is infusing. As an Italian, I make limoncello every season – and we thought, ‘maybe we can do something like that, infuse the spirits’.”
“So that’s basically what we’re trying to do now – so we have a Negroni which is sort of rotating with Italian spirits – we’re doing one with a coffee-infused vermouth or cocoa-infused Campari – just to give it a little bit of a twist,” Katia adds.
See the recipe for Testun’s Cocoa-infused Negroni here.
Katia also explains that the drinks menu was broadly aligned with Testun’s food offering.
“What we want to showcase is a continuously rotating food menu, and the same thing with the wine offering – its continuously rotating.
“Maybe we get like 12 bottles of wine, and it’s gone within three, days, and the same with the guys in the kitchen, they get some local produce that you’re only able to use for a few days, and then it’s gone,” Katia says.
“With the food [we] like to reinvent some of the classic Italian traditions, so really working on the Italian classics but with a twist of some flavours you maybe don’t find in Italian cuisine, and I think it’s the same with the drinks – starting from the goon wine, or Italian verietals grown in Australia.”
“The concept is really to offer something honest, but good.”
Here Katia encapsulates not only the spirit of the bar as a whole, but her approach to hospitality as a whole.
“We hope that in our little place we can be somehow of inspiration, and reinforce the message to hospitality professionals that it can be fun – it is fun, if you’ve for the passion and you do it with your friends, it’s a sustainable life.”
