Adelaide’s best tigelle is on Magill Road.

“At the end of the day it’s just bread, like pizza. It’s a little bit different,” Enrico Paterni says.

Don’t be fooled by the modesty of this statement; Enrico and his wife Orietta know there is an art to the tigelle, and if your experience with this circular flatbread comes purely from an Italian café chain in Adelaide, you’ve probably not had tigelle at its very best.

As former owners of Cibo on Hutt Street, Enrico and Orietta know this truth better than most, and so decided, after many trips to see family in Italy, their next venture after leaving the franchise would be to bring a tigelleria to Adelaide.

What you should expect at Rusco and Brusco is tigelle done right.

“The tigelle comes warm, so fresh – [we] cook it in this special machine in the kitchen… and the ingredients are cold,” Enrico says.

“They have to be cold because they are so good quality, if we cook [the ingredients] they become as normal. In Italy as well… they do exactly the same. So they cook the bread for the tigelle, they put fresh ingredients, filling, so that’s the secret.

“For example, [in our] romagnola there is prosciutto and buffalo stracciatella, it’s something special. So the important [thing] is for the people, they don’t have to taste a mix of the products, they have to feel every single [ingredient] in there – that’s the secret. And you can do this only when the product’s fresh, when the bread is just cooked in the kitchen, like a good pizza.”

With 38 different varieties of tigelle – including dessert and breakfast options (read: Nutella or Vegemite on freshly cooked bread) – there’s a deep well of options to dive into, but Enrico and Orietta have not strictly limited themselves to one item.

“We said we can’t do just tigelle, that’s the reason why we do breakfast in the morning… and then we do pasta… but just a few things because we don’t want to be a restaurant,” Enrico says.

“We want to be more an Osteria. Osteria in Italy is something very simple where there’s… very simple dishes that you can do yourself at home, but very, very good quality.”

“Almost like going to an Italian’s house and Mum’s cooked dinner for you, or your nonna’s cooked dinner for you, that sort of simple Italian dishes,” Orietta says.

There’s plenty of options for us to come back for, but it might take some time to wean CityMag off the Nutella tigelle.

!!! 🙂