Fitzroy’s newest restaurant is the last thing you might expect from a Michelin-starred chef

French-Italian chef Benjamin Tremblet entered the restaurant game with fine-dining fever, cutting his teeth at Michelin-starred establishments in Paris and Lyon under culinary giants Alain Ducasse and Paul Bocuse. But his first Australian restaurant is far from fancy.

Instead, it’s an ode to the heart-filled home cooking of his late nonna. “I lost her when I was 14, just after I decided to become a chef,” says Tremblet. “When I started culinary school, I said, ‘When I open a restaurant, I’m going to name it Norma, after her’.”

It’s taken 25 years, but this week Tremblet opens Norma on Smith Street in Fitzroy, swapping fine dining for family style to serve the simple dishes he ate as a kid.

Armed with Norma’s handwritten recipe books, Tremblet does dough just like she did, for pizzette: small, shareable pizzas with leopard-spotted crusts and seasonal toppings. He’s thinking zucchini and stracciatella right now, plus a classic like a margherita.

“I’m also mixing in my French background, as well as my childhood and career,” adds Tremblet, who grew up near the Bordeaux wine region and moved to Melbourne in 2019.

That influence is seen at Norma in well-executed classics such as salade Niçoise, and a savoury tarte tatin that captures the seasonal abundance of tomatoes. There’s also coquilletto: “It’s a pasta dish my grandmother used to make me when she didn’t have time to cook – just pasta, cream, parmesan and whatever was left over in the fridge like ham or prosciutto.”

Like Tremblet himself, the wine list bounces between France, Italy and Australia. But it’ll soon have an even stronger sense of home, with bottles of Bergerac wine from his family’s vineyard in France set to arrive in Melbourne in the coming months.

Occupying a former Chinese restaurant next to fire-driven Flint, Norma is meant to emulate the same homely feel of the menu. A textural copper bar and burnt-orange banquette contrast with a forest-green staircase, leading up to a second level that will be used for private dining.

Norma opens on Friday, March 8: Wed-Thu 5pm-9pm, Fri 5pm-late, Sat 10am-late, Sun 10am-3pm.

197 Smith Street, Fitzroy, normafitzroy.au