We talk to Marco Salzano and Luca Muscato from Super Norma about their warm and inviting pasta bar in Carlton. What lead them to open it and why they are so passionate about pasta and the value in a good quality olive oil.
Tell us about Super Norma. What can people expect to eat and experience when they visit your venue?
Super Norma is our little pasta bar in Carlton. At the heart of it, it’s about the food we grew up with and the food we still love eating ourselves: simple, generous Italian food where good ingredients do most of the work.
Pasta is obviously at the centre of everything. Our cooking is rooted in Italian tradition, especially Southern Italian, but we also like to play around with it depending on what’s in season and what we feel like cooking. So there are always a few classics, alongside dishes that change.
We want Super Norma to feel warm and informal. Somewhere you can come in for a bowl of pasta and a glass of wine, have a chat, and maybe stay a bit longer than you planned.
When did you start cooking and why?
Cooking has always been part of our lives. Growing up in Italian families, food was just part of the everyday. You cooked because people were coming over, because there was something in the garden that needed to be used, or simply because everyone needed to eat.
Opening Super Norma made us look at that relationship with food in a different way. Suddenly we were cooking professionally and thinking more about why certain dishes and flavours were so important to us.
A lot of what we do now is about keeping that very instinctive way of cooking, while still learning, travelling and being curious.
What is your favourite Mount Zero Olive Oil to use and why?
We love the Frantoio extra virgin olive oil. We use olive oil all the time at Super Norma, both for cooking and to finish dishes, and we like that the Frantoio has a lot of character without taking over the other flavours.
Good olive oil can completely change something really simple. It’s also very close to the way we grew up eating — good bread, tomatoes, vegetables or pasta often don’t need much more than salt and a really good olive oil.
Describe your food style as chefs.
Simple, seasonal and instinctive.
We don’t really like adding things to a dish just to make it more complicated. Most of the time we’re actually trying to do the opposite and work out what we can take away while still making it delicious.
Our food is grounded in Italian cooking and tradition, but we don’t think tradition has to be fixed. Italian food has always changed depending on where people live, what grows around them and what they have available.
So we respect the foundations, but we also like to have fun with them.
Most memorable food moment of 2026?
One of the best things for us this year has been seeing the community that has grown around Super Norma, especially through Ciao Pasta Club.
People have been sending us recipes and stories from completely different backgrounds, and it’s been a nice reminder that a recipe is almost never just a recipe. There’s usually a person, a place or a memory behind it.
Seeing some of those recipes come into the restaurant and then having everyone sitting around the same table eating them together has been pretty special.
What is your most memorable food memory of all time?
It’s hard to choose just one because, for us, the strongest food memories are usually very simple.
Long family lunches, cooking outside, tomatoes in summer, dipping bread into the sauce before lunch is actually ready, or eating pasta straight from the pan while everyone else is still getting to the table.
Those are probably the moments that shaped how we think about food. Of course the food matters, but who you’re eating with and where you are can turn something really simple into something you remember forever.
What is Ciao Pasta Club and how can people get involved?
Ciao Pasta Club started from a very simple idea: everyone has a pasta story. We wanted to create a space where people could share a pasta recipe that means something to them. It could be something their nonna used to make, something they discovered while travelling, a new tradition they’ve created themselves, or just the pasta they cook every Sunday.
We select some of the recipes and serve them as specials at Super Norma, sharing both the dish and the story behind it. We also get everyone together at Super Norma for La Tavolata, where we eat pasta, play tombola and basically spend the afternoon around the table.
The recipe call is open until the end of November, and then the idea is to bring all those recipes and stories together into a community cookbook.
Anyone can take part — you definitely don’t need to be a chef and the recipe doesn’t need to be fancy. You can submit your recipe and story through the Ciao Pasta Club page.
What is your favourite part about running a restaurant?
The people, for sure.
Running a restaurant is hard work, and there are definitely days when you wonder why you decided to do it! But then you look around the room and see people on dates, friends catching up, families having dinner, someone celebrating something or someone just sitting at the bar having a bowl of pasta, and it makes sense again.
We also love what happens with a neighbourhood restaurant over time. People start as customers and, after enough bowls of pasta and glasses of wine, somehow become part of the family.
That sense of community is probably what we’re most proud of.
Tell us about the recipe you are sharing with us.
We’re sharing Pasta alle Vongole Fujute, an old Neapolitan recipe and one of our favourite examples of cucina povera: making something really delicious from very little.
Vongole fujute means “escaped clams”, because the funny thing is that there are actually no clams in the dish. It’s made with just a handful of ingredients: pasta, garlic, extra virgin olive oil, chilli, tomatoes and lots of fresh parsley. The garlic, parsley and olive oil give you that familiar smell and flavour of pasta alle vongole… except the vongole have run away!
There’s a story that Eduardo De Filippo came up with the dish after coming home late from the theatre and finding almost nothing in the pantry. We don’t know how true the story is, but we love it because it says a lot about Southern Italian cooking: being resourceful and making something memorable out of very simple ingredients.
And it’s definitely a dish where good olive oil matters. There are so few ingredients that there’s nowhere to hide, so the quality of the oil, tomatoes, garlic and parsley really makes the difference.
It represents a lot of what we like about cooking at Super Norma: simplicity, humour, tradition and making the most of what you have. Head here for the recipe.
