This is not a familiar end of town for me at all. Rita's Cafeteria, despite being under Victoria Park station and near the busy intersection of Johnston and Hoddle, there's a bit of an out of the way feel to this place. The shopfront is minimalist and unassuming - several of my dinner companions actually walked past it - and the cleanness of design carries on in the decor, with warm woods and crisp white walls.
Upon recommendation I had the Cavolo Nero - this is a pizza with silverbeet, blue cheese, walnuts and - the genius stroke - red grapes. The crisp base itself is also noteworthy - they add polenta to their mix, giving it a distinctive yellowish colour and rougher texture. Admittedly the base was a little too crisp for my knife's liking - a sharper tool would have made my attack on the pizza a little more graceful. I also had the radicchio, pear and pecorino salad - the bitterness of the radicchio is a welcome change to the peppery but comparatively smooth flavour of rocket usually used in this kind of salad. A nutella calzone ended the meal on a sweet note - we shared one between four people and everyone declared that any more than that would have been the death of them...but a sweet, chocolately happy death.
The owners also run a couple of places down in Lorne, and I hear this is their first Melbourne venture. The fact that they are not in a main dining thoroughfare can go either way for them - to tap into a captive audience or to go unnoticed. I know I was certainly happy to realise that the bus that stops at the end of my street in St Kilda is the same bus that buzzes down Hoddle and thus past Rita's Cafeteria, so I might be making it down to this end of town more often than usual. read more