Waiters' Club, Melbourne 3000, Local business

Waiters' Club

Local business

20 Meyers Place
3000 Melbourne
Australia

The Waiters' Restaurant LONG before Melbourne became known for its clandestine network of happening bars down hard-to-find lanes, Meyers Place was pioneering the concept.

The lane is home to the Meyers Place Bar (which opened in 1994) as well as newcomer Loop.

But the lane's oldest, most delicious hideaway is the Waiters' Restaurant, which resides up a flight of rickety wooden stairs and is marked at street level by a simple chalkboard advertising the day's specials - porcini risotto, pumpkin ravioli, calamari salad, lamb alla Romana, grilled flounder, salmon steak.

The Waiters' Restaurant is directly on top of the Meyers Place Bar but began its colourful life decades before, in 1947, as a haunt for the city's Italian and Spanish waiters who would unwind after work over a game of cards and a cup of coffee (more often than not, a euphemism for wine).

Back then it was known as the Italian Waiters' Club and a secret password would get you up the stairs.

A cheerfully mutinous air still pervades the narrow first-floor restaurant, with its laminex tables, simple kitchen chairs, '70s wood-panelling and loud print curtains.

It's a setting made for bonhomie and a no-nonsense feed. Since the late '70s, the restaurant has been owned and run by the Sabbadini family, first by the late Carlo, now by son Denis who is continuing the family tradition and maintaining the casalinga atmosphere, serving dishes such as osso buco, braised ox tail and gnocchi.

"I'm probably old-fashioned," says Denis, whose parents migrated to Australia in 1949 from the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia region in Italy's north.

"I've never had a sun-dried tomato in the restaurant."