Maria: Sheffield’s stylish new trattoria serving joyful Italian food

On the food front it’s got significant history too and is always way ahead of, dare I say it, Leeds. Back in the day we were eating authentic curries at Manzil and the Taj Mahal, brilliant burgers at Uncle Sam’s Diner on Eccy Road (est. 1971), and if you were going posh, David Baldwin’s Omega (I bet a few of you are nodding your heads here), where we had prawn cocktail, his ‘signature tableside roast beef carvery’, and Black Forest Gateau. Ah, the good old days before gastropubs and microherbs.

Now there’s Michelin-starred Jöro and a dozen Good Food Guide entries, including Hillsborough’s Orange Bird, Rafters, Pellizco, Domo and – my fave and still hard to score a table – No Name in downtown Crookes. Jack Wakelin and Tom Aronica have a handful of GFG recommendations too, including Bench, their neighbourhood bar-restaurant and the chic cocktail bar, The Pearl at Park Hill. They met working at Public, the bar named after the gent’s toilets under the City Hall (it’s much better than you’d imagine), and in the last few years have been quietly transforming eating out in the city centre.

Their latest opening, Maria, is bang in the middle of a town that’s so altered (in a good way) I don’t recognise it despite it being my birth town. Ok, it might be a few decades ago.

If you’re lucky enough to have an Italian nonna, by rights you should open a trattoria. Google Pasta Grannies, and if it doesn’t make you want to move to deepest rural Italy and adopt an old lady, we can’t be friends. Vicky Benninson, originally a travel writer, made it her vocation to find as many octogenarian cooks still making pasta in tiny, ancient kitchens and give them their fifteen minutes of fame.

Aronica’s Sicilian nonna Maria is the inspiration behind their latest opening. Given the success of their enterprises, it was nailed on that it would be classy, with great pasta and good sauces, but I wasn’t prepared for the joy to come.

I like Italian food a lot, so I imagined it’d be easy to choose. That was my first mistake: I wanted it all. My chum Becky, fresh from wrangling two lively youngsters, was up for pretty much everything on a rare school night off. Despite it being 6 o’clock on a Wednesday, the place is packed, and the buzz of folk having a good time is very much the vibe we were hoping for. It’s a big, high-ceilinged space with a stone floor and electricity ducts snaking along the concrete ceiling, the sort of post-industrial chic a Sheffield restaurant can legitimately pull off. An open kitchen along one side has a small army of chefs searing, chopping and plating, and threading seamlessly through the room a band of hip young servers for whom nothing is too much trouble: sorry we’re late – no problem at all. Can we move to a booth? Of course.

The menu isn’t strictly Sicilian but rather Italian-inspired, so expect the likes of panelle and lemon aioli, tromboncino squash with smoked aubergine and sticky seeds, and duck breast with fig and beetroot. Salt cod on crispy polenta is a glorious way to start, the polenta a feather-light tempura, topped with silky, fishy, creamy, salty cod. A long-way-from-rustic bruschetta is layered with Puglian stracciatella, sweetly roasted courgette and topped with anchovy: two perfect mouthfuls.

Tonight’s pasta dishes: spaghetti vongole, papadelle with duck leg ragu, gnocco sardo with pesto, trapanese and a white bean cavatelli, the latter of which is hot with nduja and sweet with mussels and a dream. The pesto on the gnocco is smooth rather than sharp, but with a freshness to it – served with just a spritz of lemon, it’s gorgeous. No one needs macaroni pie with cheese sauce after plates of pasta, but who can resist? A side of squeaky cavolo nero goes some way to counterbalance the downright over-the-top-ness of pasta in pastry, but who am I kidding? It’s magnificent.

Head chef Sam Armitage has cooked his way round pretty much every good restaurant in South Yorkshire and Derbyshire, including the Devonshire Arms in Beeley, Michelin-starred Fischer’s in Baslow – ‘where produce from the Chatsworth Estate was hyper seasonal and I learned about tasting menus’ – and Joro. Aged just 22, he went on to become Head Chef at the much-garlanded Milestone before opening his own restaurant just as Covid struck – and sadly it was over before it had a chance to get going. Fast forward a year or two, and he was in the right place at the right time as Maria opened, and he’s in absolutely the right job.

There’s a terrific dessert menu: there’s fig & walnut tart, tiramisu and brown butter ice cream from Fennels. We share a dish of apple with spiced mascarpone sbriciolata (a sort of nutty buttery rubble) – and oh my word. All the flavours, all the textures – all the feels. Maria is so much more than just a bowl of pasta – I very much like the hybrid approach that speaks of years of collective experience and the confidence to put a deeply authentic dish – say spaghetti vongole – on the same list as cured Cornish mackerel. Settle in for the night or just swing by for a plate of charcuterie from Brighton-based Curing Rebels and a glass of Montepulciano from their innovative, accessible wine list. But whatever it is you’re doing, have a cocktail – a Garibaldi perhaps, or a five-pound Negroni ‘for the start, the middle or the end’. Such fun.

Dinner for two with wine £133

Trattoria Maria, 4 Wellington Street, Sheffield S1 4HD www.mariarestaurants.co.uk

Welcome5/5

Food5/5

Atmosphere5/5

Prices5/5