It's Thursday night almost nine o'clock and there's a healthy buzz at Pino's Restaurant on Maitland Road in Islington.
The long-time restaurant - a picture of the original owner Guiseppe still graces the old brick wall - has several tables of diners and the two floorstaff are busy attending to the their needs over the din of soulful rhythm and blues on the house music system. It's a cool winter night, but the windows and roller door are wide open and welcoming.
For chef and part-owner, Dion Pophristoff, it's a gratifying. For the first time in his four years at the helm, it's not a vegan-only menu.
"It's really good feedback so far," he said. "It's very different from what it was."
In early May he posted on Pino's Facebook and Instagram accounts, "This is our last week of being fully plant based. It has been a difficult decision to make, but we feel this is the right direction for us to focus on."
The response was quick, with a huge barrage of compliments and insults, as Pino's was a bastion of vegan values on its menu.
But the loyalty wasn't reaching Pino's bank account. A year of interest rate rises, plus recovering from the pandemic, hit Pino's hard. The restaurant's turnover halved in a year, bottoming out as low as $10,000 a week.
"It wasn't viable catering for such a niche [vegan]," Pophristoff said. "We turn away about 40 per cent of customers that would walk in and not know it's vegan."
It was a matter of economics: casting a wider net for a bigger customer base.
"Now, we're just catering for everyone, instead of turning the omnivores away," Pophristoff said.
"If you have a a group of six people, and one person's vegan, the vegan will have to go to a restaurant that meat eaters won't go to, you know what I mean. Whereas like, opening it up, now that we can cater to everyone, you're more likely to get groups of people. That was a big thing."
The new dinner menu includes oysters, raw scallops and picked mussels; beef carpaccio, chicken wing royale, king prawns, spanner crab, porchetta and a rib eye steak.
The breakfast menu includes a bacon & egg roll, sardine tartine, chilli crab scramble, croque monsieur and porchetta.
Pophristoff shrugs off the criticism.
"It's gone from a simple menu change to me being like, this enemy of the community," he said. "I've got a daughter, I've got staff. We all need to do what we can do to open avenues to pay the bills. They don't see as that."
For him as a chef, the change is part of the food business. He trained under Matt Moran and Andy Allen, in the fine dining scene in Sydney.
He's frank about his own style: "It was always experimental about food and a good flavour combination.
"We are not authentic Italian. We are experimental with lashings of Italian."
He gave the vegan menu a good effort for years, even extending it to the breakfast menu, creating a "vegan egg" from tofu and tomato confit with soft centre.
The creativity has now turned back to a broad menu, including dishes like porchetta made from scratch, and three shell-based appetisers (a pickled mussel, an oyster in brown butter and a raw scallop with Jerusalem artichoke).
He's quite aware household budgets are still tight - the only steak on the menu is priced at $47 - still under the $50 mark.
"We are not fine dining," he said. "More like fun dining, just apply good techniques, simple produce and make it visually striking but also tasty.
"We are trying to keep it cheap, because we are in the suburbs, after all. We are not trying to go for people in the East End, just trying to cater for people around here.
"The margins are a bit, whoa. I'd rather do it that way and let people come in and try stuff they wouldn't normally go out of their way to have at a fancy restaurant and spend that much. If you make it cheaper, at least they get to try it."
