THERE is something romantic about the late afternoon at Sal’s Pasta Deli.
Light slants in off the street, the open kitchen hums, and a fine drift of flour hangs above the pasta bench.
It looks like chaos and behaves like calm: a working pasta house going about its business while a steady stream of people drift in for dinner.
Chefs work the bench in full view, their sleeves dusted white.
The effect is oddly soothing, a kind of theatre that asks nothing of you but your admiration (especially when you hear the calls of ‘yes chef’; this is a serious kitchen at work).
That is the trick of the place. You can arrive at a quarter to five, still in work clothes, and leave 10 minutes later with a bag of restaurant-quality food, simple enough to have on the table by six.
Fresh pasta, a simple sauce, something from the cabinet to start. It is convenience, but so very far from the supermarket kind.
Sal’s is the work of Paul Salmeri, who spent his formative years cooking in Florence, an apprenticeship that still shapes the philosophy here.
Mr Salmeri’s time in Florence taught him that good cooking is mostly good buying, and the shortest route to flavour is a short list of excellent things.
In the kitchen you will find Matt McDonald, formerly of Wembley’s much-loved Mummucc’, bringing his own fluency in Italian cooking to the bench.
What makes Sal’s compelling and, frankly, rare is its hybrid approach. Top-end retail, carefully sourced, is folded into an experiential one, with chefs cooking and the room alive around them.
The cabinets and shelves read like a well-judged DJ set, moving between Western Australia and Italy with ease and intent. Meats come from butcher David Torre.
Cheeses are from Perth’s La Delizia Latticini and the family that has made tomatoes oh-so-cool, Stakehill, have fresh boxes populating the counter.
Then the tempo shifts to Italy and its great flours, olive oils and seasonings, the building blocks of a serious kitchen sold over the counter.
Pasta is the heart of it. It is made with organic, biodynamic Mulino Marino flour from Italy, and increasingly in older, traditional shapes worked by hand. Each form is chosen for how it eats, how it holds a sauce, how it carries texture.
The shapes change with what the kitchen is making: a ribbon for butter and herbs one day, a sturdier tube for a slow ragu the next. The pinsa is one of the best you’ll ever have and make sure to get in quickly when the porchetta is on.
The result has made Sal’s one of the most sought-after addresses in Cottesloe. The alfresco terrace is the prize, bordered by tall planters that screen the street and lend the whole thing a European ease.
The crowd is mixed: locals on a standing order, the after-work dash for dinner, the unhurried table that has cleared the diary.
Salmeri’s ambition does not sit still. A container is due next week carrying nine new products from Italy, several of them not yet seen in Australia.
Mr Salmeri says they are the best he could find, and the finding is the point. The searching, the importing and the showing of Italy’s finest to a Perth audience is the business as much as the pasta is.
It is a model worth watching. Retail and hospitality have spent years circling one another in this city, usually settling for a fridge of takeaway near the till. Sal’s makes the two genuinely inseparable and turns provenance into something you can taste at the counter and again at your own table.
For a retail proposition, the economics are unusual: the same hands that sell you flour and cheese also cook, advise and build the reputation that brings the next customer in.
Margin and craft are not at odds here; they reinforce each other.
Personal and principled, Sal’s offers WA something it has had too little of: a retail dining experience built on craft, generosity and genuine care. Go for the pasta. Stay for the education.
Sal’s Pasta Deli
44 Napoleon Street
Cottesloe
• Georgia Moore is editor-in-chief of the WA Good Food Guide
