What does the suburban Italian restaurant of tomorrow look (and taste) like? Head to Beaufort Street and see for yourself

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It’s a shame that new restaurants rarely get the chance to evolve nowadays.

It doesn’t matter if you want to point the finger at social media pressures, increased competition or the urgent need for operators to start making money right away to help recoup the costs associated with blown fit-out budgets and opening delays (seemingly par-for-course these days): the key takeaway here is that hospitality venues are operating under an unspoken one-strike-and-you’re-out rule.

If your restaurant – or bar or cafe – doesn’t come out of the box fully formed and doesn’t hit a home run immediately, customers aren’t likely to come back.

Such lofty expectations aren’t just unfair from a customer demand perspective – could you imagine being given a full performance review after one week at a new job? – they also affect diversity. The fewer people that are willing to take risks and try new stuff, the more cynical, trend-driven, CTRL-C, CTRL-V venues and menus we’ll see around Perth.

But while pushing envelopes requires gumption, equally important is the presence of open-minded customers that are willing to hold space for ambitious operators to try, fall and pick themselves up. A lot of time passes between being thenew kid on the block and being recognised as a stalwart that’s been faithfully serving your community for decades.

One of the stages a venue might experience between opening day and attaining legend status is the makeover. You can’t really undergo a makeover if you’re too new but if you leave that restaurant mid-life crisis too long, you’re just going to alienate the people around you. An innings around the decade mark seems about right, or at least it does in the life story of Threecoins & Sons, a neighbourhood Italian restaurant on Beaufort Street that (re)opened in October.

Previously, the restaurant was known simply as Three Coins: an honest and earnest Italian restaurant named after the Trequattrini (“three coins” in Italian) family that moved into the space in 2014. Locals fell fast for Three Coins and its comforting trifecta of handmade pasta, wood-fired pizza and BYO: all things one looks for when casting the role of neighbourhood Italian eatery. (“What they’re churning out here … is good, reasonable, honest, feel-good fare made with well-sourced produce and lots of love,” wrote Gail Williams in her 2015 Three
Coins review.)

Keeping a busy, six-day-a-week neighbourhood restaurant running is no mean feat and after nine years of service, the time came for a hardware upgrade. One reason for this, naturally, was wear and tear. Another, however, was updating the Three Coins experience: a decision, I suspect, that might have been inspired by the Trequattrinis and adopted son Chris Caravella opening spin-off wine bar Testun up the road. (Caravella and Frank Trequattrini share head chef duties between both venues.)

Whereas Three Coins was all about comforting Italian cooking, Testun’s free-wheeling menu frequently kidnapped la vera cucina and took it to places it had never been before. Think charcoal-grilled snapper with a Korean-inspired gochujang vodka sauce, or raw beef sharpened by Chinese chilli oil and a Siamese-style pickled mango salad.

Not that the Trequattrinis were planning anything so drastic with the mothership. Instead, Three Coins’ transformation into Threecoins & Sons was more renovation than knockdown-rebuild. Deeply stained timber chairs and glossy red, brown and white tiles maintain the familiar, trattoria-esque vibe. It’s a Tuesday night and I spy babies in high chairs and multi-generational family get-togethers. Magnetic restaurant manager Katia Taschetti leads the warm, exuberant floor team by example and joins her charges in taking orders, bringing
things to the table and snapping group shots on smartphones.

In other words, while the setting might have changed, the spirit of Threecoins survived the makeover intact. One thing that did go, though, was the BYO. While I don’t know how the drinks list’s sharply priced vino – including big-value house wines available by the glass, half-litre and litre – has gone down with regulars, in the context of other restaurant wine lists, the mark-ups are super reasonable both in terms of by-the-glass and by-the-bottle options.

But if dinner was cause for celebration, there’s fancy bottles on offer too. (And vermouth for before the meal, plus bracing amari for afters.)

While the pizzas were another casualty of the reboot, they’ve been replaced with another equally charismatic Italian flatbread. Perth, meet pinsa, a crisp and puffy Roman bread served here in eight, mostly traditional-leaning toppings. A verdant broccoli puree overlaid with anchovies and a blob of cut-it-yourself La Delizia burrata ($25) makes a fine bread course for two or a light dinner for one.

The kitchen also flexes its baking chops with charry garlic focaccia ($10): slices of airy focaccia branded with hash marks from the char-grill and generously anointed with the good stuff.

You’ll want some of the foc to maximise the joy you’ll get from the startingly good chilli mussels ($26), or as it’s spruiked on the menu: “sauteed mussels, chickpeas, Calabrese chilli”. The molluscs are plump, nutty chickpeas and tiny mopheads of sauteed onions provide texture, and the fermented chilli might be the best thing that’s happened to seafood since the invention of mayonnaise.

Don’t you dare let a drop of broth find its way back to the kitchen.

The cuttlefish linguine ($32; one of the six pastas on the winter menu) is another
masterclass in pescatarian thrills, the cuttlefish is cut into tender dainty curls and teamed with confit tomatoes before being tossed through a toothsome linguine (extruded in house) that’s been turbo-charged with toasted nori powder.

Other menu highlights: whereas most arancini is so often a second chance at love for leftover rice, the golden, softball-sized specimens here ($9) are no afterthought. Flavours change according to the kitchen’s whims but pasta remakes seem to be a recurring theme.

I am properly crushing on Threecoins & Sons and wish it was my local neighbourhood Italian restaurant.

In November I was thrilled by a pasta al norma remake. This month, it was an arancino heavy with tender risotto rice bound by Bolognese ragu that made me swoon.

Very good bone-in pork cotoletta ($36) is the latest addition to the line-up of usual main course suspects of beef, fish, chicken and lamb. Brined for succulence and armoured in a blend of Italian and Japanese breadcrumbs and Parmesan, the pork simultaneously evokes memory of excellent tempura and Sunday dinner with nonna. A small hillock of cabbage braised in Peroni beer offers a sharp counterpoint to the pork’s richness while the accompanying hot mustard is best approached with caution.

Of course there’s a tiramisu ($16) among the two-item dessert list, although the (admittedly delicious) double-decker of coffee-soaked sponge and mascarpone dusted with finely grated chocolate feels more cakey than creamy decadence. The earl grey pannacotta ($14) however, polls much higher on the all-important dessert lushness scale, although I’d probably love it more if it was paired with something a little less sweet than the limoncello syrup it’s served with.

But all in all, a sugary dessert is a minor gripe in the scheme of things. I am properly crushing on Threecoins & Sons and wish it was my local neighbourhood Italian restaurant.

Granted, its menu prices might not be rock-bottom cheap – let’s be honest, cheese plus something tomato based slathered on pasta is almost always delicious and is something most places can turn out at an accessible buy-in-but the cooking overdelivers at this price point.

Mid-range, accessible dining seems to be the city’s flavour du jour with operators scrambling to open places that (increasingly cash-conscious) eaters might visit more than once a year.

As far as a blueprint for what an Italian version of this ideal might look like, it’s hard to go past Threecoins & Sons. Then again, the restaurant’s modus operandi – cook good food, serve it with a smile and charge a fair price for it – isn’t exactly rocket science.

Yet at a time when so much dining seems to be based on chasing trends, maybe getting back to and focussing on hospitality basics is the most radical thing chefs and restaurateurs can do?