With its rich, dark colours and moody ambience, Pendolino is a very different restaurant for Sydney. Nino Zoccali’s venture in the Strand Arcade is a restaurant, café, wine bar and specialty olive oil store. But what makes it particularly unique is the way different olive oils are featured right through the menu.

“People talk about us being different. Some people say it’s very New York, but it reminds some people of Italy as well,” says Zoccali. “You possibly wouldn’t find any thing like this even in Italy.”

Pendolino opened in April last year and within months had won the Restaurant and Catering Australia award for best new restaurant in Australia. Zoccali is as pleased as punch to have won the award, not least because he appreciates the complex judging process. “They’re quite scientific in terms of how they rate,” he says. “I know the guy who developed the system of rating so I know how detailed that is.”

Zoccali, who first came to notice in Sydney as the opening executive chef at Otto and Nove, grew up in Bunbury, Western Australia, surrounded by Italian tradition. The son of a Calabrian-born father and an Australian mother, he did a double degree in economics and Italian to acquire his father’s language and immerse himself in Italian culture.

Italy has been “a very strong theme” for him throughout his life. “My father was a big influence,” Zoccali says of his move into hospitality. “He had a small olive grove and vineyard, and would grow everything imaginable. He made his own wine and grew everything we ate.”

While he was studying, Zoccali did various odd jobs that furthered his interest in hospitality. “I worked at the fruit and vegetable markets in Perth for an extremely good importer, which was very exciting. I was blown away by the quality of the vegetables. I also worked in a range of hospitality venues as a kitchen hand, where I got really inspired.”

In the early 1990s, he went to Italy for a year to further his studies, and while he was there, he undertook various jobs in hospitality that also fired his passion for cooking.

On his return, he helped a friend set up a café in Perth before establishing a restaurant in Margaret River. He ran that for two and a half years before selling it and moving east to work at restaurants such as Grossi Florentino in Melbourne and Bel Mondo in Sydney.

But it was when he teamed up with Maurice Terzini to open Otto on Sydney’s Woolloomooloo Wharf that he first came to the attention of the dining public. He left in 2002 to undertake consultancy work, helping hotel groups launch their restaurant operations and working extensively with Australian olive oil companies, all the time keeping an eye out for the right restaurant deal. “I’ve had the complex idea [for Pendolino] for a long time but was waiting for the right opportunity,” he says. “I thought this site would be good.”

During his five-year stint in consultancy work, Zoccali undertook a course with I Maestri Oleari, a prestigious Italian olive oil tasting organisation, and joined the Australian olive oil tasting panel.

An unabashed supporter of Australian olive oil, he has offered Pendolino as the venue for the National Olive Oil Show in September. “What’s really prompted it for me is that in the last ten years, the industry has really exploded and people don’t under stand how high the quality (of Australian olive oil) is.”

The restaurant sells around 80 Australian and imported oils, many of them from northern NSW. “Some really fall into the Grand Cru category, and some from Tasmania you won’t see anywhere else on the mainland.”

In L’Olioteca, meaning olive oil library or store, one of the restaurant’s long narrow rooms is lined with shelves filled with oils. Zoccali’s pride and joy is the dispensary, reminiscent of the days in Australia when you could only buy olive oil in a pharmacy. His L’Olioteca brand of olive oil is sold in medicine bottles that customers exchange when they return for a refill. “Once a year I meet with producers to get the blend I want.”

The restaurant’s menu is “strictly Italian”. “Pendolino is not a small restaurant; it em ploys 50 people but I still do quite a few services on the pass,” says Zoccali. “I’m very hands-on. It’s my food. It has a very authentic Italian flavour. We use the best produce we can source from Australia and Italy. We also aim to reduce our carbon footprint—we get as close to Sydney as we can get. Over 30 per cent of our menu is vegetarian, be cause they’re great dishes.”

Different olive oils are featured through out the menu and Zoccali says customers “get right into” matching the oils with their dishes. Among the most popular dishes are spinach and cheese ravioli, and spaghetti with barramundi, Spencer Gulf king prawns, olive oil, chilli, garlic and capers.

“We take our pasta extremely seriously. We have a dedicated pasta kitchen upstairs, we use organic flour and eggs, and everything is cooked from scratch.”

The restaurant also has an impressive wine list, with Italian wines representing around 60 to 70 per cent of sales.

Most people would say that Pendolino could not have opened at a worse time, with the pressure on restaurants to remain viable greater than it has ever been. However, the success so far has flown against the predictions of difficult times for top end restaurants. Zoccali says customers keep rolling through the doors.

“The word on the street is that [Sydney] restaurants are down 10 to 20 per cent. That’s not just since the financial crisis. It’s been like that for the whole of last year,” says Zoccali. “But we are trading strongly.”

He says the key to surviving a downturn is to focus on the quality of your product even more. “The secret to success, especially during a downturn, is to be obsessive about your produce because that’s what drives people back,” he says. “You also have to be sensitive about price point. If you undervalue what you do, you miss out on the upper end of the business. And you have to be obsessive about cost management.”

Zoccali says restaurants should be looking to maximise the prices they charge, but he cautions, “it needs to be a value for money proposition”.

“There is price sensitivity. It’s a juggling act but any business has these things to contend with. Consistency is critical.”