a week ago, my mum and i walked the gauntlet of cleveland street to stand in line at sopra, for a taste of the sydney italian festival prosciutto promotion. we stood for a long while, almost as long as it took to walk to waterloo from glebe, and then we gazed upon the handwritten board at the three-item-long special menu.

three.

it was written all in italian, but “melone” in the first one was pretty easy to decipher and came, tantalisingly with “gamberi”, and i vaguely remembered that “agnello” in the third one is lamb, so twenty minutes later, when a waiter came ’round to see if we were waiting for something (“um, actually, yes, we are waiting for our orders to be taken”), that is what we ordered.

the middle option involved some sort of pasta and melanzane, and when it arrived at the next table, it turned out to be a penne-moulded-around-chopped-vegetables-and-baked sort of thing.

the prosciutto and melon salad was all colour and light, and the surprise thing (if you don’t read so much italian) was that the third party was a tangle of fennel salad topped with two grilled prawns, tasting of sea and salt. the prosciutto was pink and springy, and tasted strongly of fresh pig. all delicious.

the lamb was a backstrap, wrapped in prosciutto, perched atop a small heap of baby vegetables — carrots, potatoes, tiny artichokes, green beans — and fat, flavoursome field mushrooms. it was very tasty, but the lamb was disappointingly tough. halfway through i figured that taking much smaller bites made it more manageable.

we shared it all, as well as a rocket and parmesan salad, because what our waiter said when i asked if the meals came with vegetables, was, “no”. it was not a bad thing though, because if you have had another rocket and parmesan salad elsewhere, you might be expecting some dressed leaves crowned with a few shards of cheese. but. at sopra, the dressing is the cheese! tiny ground up bits of salty parmesan mixed into the oil, coating each rocket leaf, so you get cheesy flavour in every bite. genius! and the flakes of sea salt! so very salty!

as we cleaned our plates, we noticed that all the other tables had attentive waitpeople who explained the italian menu in great detail, and that the guest chef, massimo spigaroli (president of the italian prosciutto consortium) stopped at most of the tables to ask how everything was. we were afforded no such pleasantries, and so were equally tough (like a lamb backstrap) when it came to leaving a tip.

(noodlebowl has some very luscious pictures of the other prosciutto event.)