This new Club Bay View brings great service, splendid drinks and good snacks to Claremont

Lyndon Waples isn’t the most Italian sounding name in the phone book. Yet, that hasn’t deterred the one-time Print Hall head honcho from running busy Italian eateries in affluent Perth neighbourhoods. (Ciao Il Lido, ciao Canteen Pizza.)

His newest interest is Il Santo in Claremont: a slender, wine tunnel of a room on Bay View Terrace that opened in May.

Or more accurately reopened.

Following a makeover led by Adelaide’s Studio Gram, the old Nolita site emerged with a modern, pared-back look sporting just enough bling.

The calibre of Il Santo’s wine and cocktail offering certainly makes agreeing to “just one more” dangerously easy. Sure, prices are higher than your local bowlo might charge, but so is the quality of what attentive waitstaff are splashing into your glass.

Previously at CBD member’s club Lawson Flats, restaurant manager Silvia Gelves leads by engaged, smiley example. She’s ably supported by Sally Lovell and Melanie Watts: career hospitality pros and high-ranking officers in Waples’ organisation. Collectively, they’re a friendly bunch and strike me as hosts that are invested in showing guests a good time.

Having given the menu a good shake over multiple visits, I’d say the surest way to achieving good times is by assembling a small table of friends – two or three feels right – and going hard on the small plates.

The grilled skewer contrasting cubes of fatty swordfish belly against a sharp, almost plummy capsicum agrodolce, say. Or the debonair veal carpaccio, spicy with creamed horseradish, jagged spears of mizuna and good olive oil.

Bubbly ingots of focaccia are perfect for mopping up plates but play equally nice with the Vegemite-spiked butter they come with. You’ll spy all these snacky, wine bar-style dishes on the top half of Il Santo’s concise menu under the heading of “to start”.

You’ll also spy a pork cutlet and steak (a tender, fatcap-off striploin that’s been carefully grilled and sliced thick) among the larger plates here. In lieu of chips or fries, glorious roast potatoes with the perfect ratio of crunch to fluff will be your empty carbohydrate pleasure for today.

There is also, naturally, pasta. Here, the kitchen deploys pastas (made at Il Lido) in time-honoured combinations such as linguine vongole and cavatelli in a cream sauce enriched with pebbles of fennel-spiked pork.

While both these pastas were a little off the mark – the clams brought little oceanic flavour to the party; some of my chubby, worm-like cavatelli had clumped together to form a chewy mess – these shortfalls were fast forgotten after inhaling the mafaldine e fagioli – chef Nicola Lunardi’s inspired remake of a pasta soup found in his native Veneto.

Starring frilly mafaldine noodles and red borlotti beans (fagioli) bound in an addictive bean broth and blanketed with shaved Parmigianna Regiano, this ugly-delicious jumble is one of the best vegetarian things I’ve eaten all year.

It’s also exactly the kind of nourishing, homely food that I’d hope to encounter if I was out dining solo.

And so we come to the end of the meal where a pert citrus tart and, predictably, tiramisu and cheese await. Consider, too, the cantucci and Vin Santo one-two: a dessert meal deal pairing rusk-like biscuits studded with almonds plus a pour of the caramelly sweet wine that contributed to the restaurant’s name.

Traditionally, eaters softened cantucci by dunking pieces of it into their Vin Santo, a bit like an Italian Tim Tam Slam. Some keep their biscuit almost dry. Others let it soak until it attains a semi-liquid state. How you enjoy your cantucci is, much like Il Santo, entirely up to you.

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