Rolled every morning
Two pasta chefs start at 6am. Semolina and free-range egg, nothing else. Anything left at close is staff dinner, which is a strong incentive to get the numbers right.
Since 2019
A printworks, a pasta room, and a lot of Tuesdays
Orlo was never meant to be a special-occasion restaurant. It was meant to be the one you go to on a Tuesday.
How it started
Two floors, one stubborn idea
The building at 214 Lygon printed wedding stationery for forty years. When we found it in 2018 it still smelled faintly of ink and had a freight lift that only went down.
That lift is why the pasta room ended up in the basement. Every morning, sheets of dough are rolled, cut and sent up in trays — tagliatelle, tonnarelli, agnolotti, pappardelle — and by six o’clock most of it is gone. We make fourteen shapes. We make them badly for about a week each time we add one, and then we make them properly for years.
Upstairs we kept as much of the room as we could: the brick, the sawtooth roof, the iron columns. What we added was a twelve-metre marble bar, low lighting that flatters everyone, and a wine list that decided early on to look no further than this country.
Six years on, roughly a third of the room on any given night is people who have been here before. That is the only measure of success we’ve ever really cared about.
What we believe
Cook like an Italian. Shop like a Victorian. Pour like an Australian.
Three sentences on a wall in the kitchen, written on the first day and never once revised.
The three things
What we spend our time on
Everything else — the plates, the playlist, the lighting — exists to keep these three from being disturbed.
Three deliveries a week
Growers in the Yarra Valley, Bacchus Marsh and Werribee South. Fish from Port Phillip and the far south coast. The menu is rewritten to suit what turns up, not the other way around.
Australian, full stop
180-odd labels, all grown here. Cool-climate whites, savoury reds, a shelf of skin contact, and a genuine effort to keep half the list under $80.
The people
Who’s in tonight
A small team, most of whom have been here since the first year. If someone remembers your order, that is why.
Head Chef
Luca Barbieri
Grew up between Bologna and Brunswick, trained in both. Runs a quiet kitchen and an aggressive relationship with the fish supplier. Believes ragù is finished when it stops asking for anything.
Sommelier & Co-owner
Sienna Rowe
Built the all-Australian list against a fair amount of advice to the contrary. Will happily talk for twenty minutes about Heathcote sangiovese, or just pour you something good and leave you alone.
General Manager
Tom Whelan
Has run the floor since week one. Keeps eight bar seats free every night for walk-ins and defends them like a border. Responsible for most of the reasons people come back.
A short history
Six years, give or take
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2018 · The lease
A disused printworks with good bones and a terrible kitchen. Eleven months of building, most of it spent on ventilation.
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2019 · Doors open
Forty-two seats, six pasta shapes, a list of ninety wines. Sold out the first Friday and then nothing at all for a fortnight.
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2021 · Downstairs
The Cellar opens as a twelve-seat private room, largely because we ran out of anywhere else to put the wine.
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2023 · La Sala
The old loading dock becomes a 24-seat private dining room with its own bar. Functions become a proper part of what we do.
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Today
Ninety seats, fourteen pasta shapes, 180 Australian labels, and the same eight bar stools kept aside for whoever wanders in.
Kind words
What people have said
★★★★★
“Six visits and it has never once been merely fine. The pappardelle with wild boar in July was the best thing I ate all year, and the room on a wet Wednesday is genuinely one of the nicest places to sit in Melbourne.”
Alexandra M. Diner · Carlton North
★★★★★
“An all-Australian list in an Italian restaurant sounds like a gimmick until you drink it. The Heathcote sangiovese alongside the ragù was the single best pairing I’ve had this year.”
The Melbourne Table Wine feature · 2025
★★★★☆
“Warm, confident, unfussy. Orlo has quietly become the Lygon Street benchmark — the rare restaurant that is as happy to serve you a bowl of pasta at the bar as it is a four-hour dinner.”
Fork & Vine Guide Annual review · 2025
Come and see
Best understood from a table
Book a table, or wander down and try the bar. Tuesday, as we may have mentioned, is a very good night for it.