Bar Benevento opened today on the ground floor of the Adina Town Hall Hotel, at the corner of Kent and Bathurst streets in Sydney's CBD, with a drinks list of more than 300 amari drawn from around the world.

The Italian eatery is the latest project from brothers Anthony and Julian Izzillo, the operators behind Wildfire and de Vine Food and Wine. They have partnered with Kosta Papanikitas of The Fermantalists and Head Chef Tim Fisher on the venue.

The concept honours the brothers' late father's origins. It takes its name from Benevento, the Italian city where he was born.

What are the trading hours and menu structure?

The venue serves breakfast, lunch, coffee, sweets and aperitivo. Weekday hours run 7am to 3pm, Monday to Friday. Weekend service is shorter: 7am to 11:30am. Dinner service is planned, though no launch date has been announced.

That daypart split shapes the menu engineering. Fisher has built the offer around Southern Italian dishes, with a ricotta and egg yolk ravioli topped with Strega-infused hollandaise positioned as the signature. The spirit, a herbal liqueur from Benevento, also appears in a tiramisu that replaces coffee with wild mint and saffron Strega.

Breakfast items include tagliata steak and eggs and a breakfast antipasto plate with a six-minute egg and gravlax. Lunch leans on pasta, weekly specials, chicken cotoletta, panini and a selection of meats and cheeses.

"We've tried to create hero dishes that haven't been done in Sydney before, whether that's boiling and baking our taralli like a bagel so it's soft and warm for dipping, or swapping coffee for wild mint and saffron Strega in our tiramisu," Fisher said.

Why the name and the amaro count matter

The brothers frame the venue as an extension of family history. Their grandfather arrived in Australia from Benevento in 1953, post-war, and worked for five years before bringing over his wife and children.

"So much of what we grew up eating came from those early years, when they started with nothing and slowly built up a life here, so bringing those flavours into Bar Benevento feels like a special way of carrying that story forward," Julian said.

The drinks program gives the story commercial teeth. Beyond the 300-plus amari, the wine list covers 20 Italian regions. That depth of Italian sourcing is a differentiator in the CBD day-trade segment, where hotel-lobby competitors rarely carry a full regional spread.

What comes next?

The immediate question is dinner. A hotel ground-floor site with a 300-bottle amaro library and aperitivo positioning is built for evening trade. The operators say dinner service will launch soon, with details to follow.