@ninetta.hk isn’t really about a doting nonna so much as the idea of one: a beloved matriarch with a rich story to tell and far too much food to share.

It’s a familiar conceit in the current wave of nostalgia-minded trattorias, where you’ll find veal chops and stuffed whole chickens on ornate silver platters, with thick drapes and flowered carpets to match. But if this Ninetta were personified, she’d be a little spunkier, with a healthy fetish for antique wall art and a flair for preparing said veal chop whose crust survives under a layer of molten provola and pink, salty ribbons of mortadella. You’ll find this and other terrific dishes like it on the 3rd floor of a Ginza-style commercial building on Wellington Street, in Hong Kong.

By Monday night, the conceit becomes clearer under the trained hands of the chef Marco Xodo (ex Testina), with Antimo Maria Merone (Estro) among its co-founders. You may find athleisure-clad aunties bent over a plate of braised baby octopus and a bottle of Etna Rosso, or families inducting their worldly children into pork neck and zucchini skewers. But the more adventurous among them should consider offal via Xodo’s yellow-chicken ragu, which embraces all the parts — heart, gizzard, comb — caught in broad folds of pappardelle. Or sweet peas, dotted in and around hand-folded tortellini and cream, which arrive in a tall porcelain tureen.

There’s a tableside braid of mozzarella, as satisfyingly thick as the torso of Michelin Man, and a textbook tonnato, where the veal is rosy and tender and the tuna sauce velvety, but when I return — reservations permitting — I’ll supplement the milanese and pappardelle with the lasagne terrine, handsomely crisped at the edges, and Ninetta’s excellent desserts. My favourite among them is the pistachio cake, almost weightless, in a sabayon that pushes the pistachio from sweet toward roasted and faintly smoky.

For all the looking backward, Ninetta feels remarkably alive. Thanks @theforksandspoons852 for paving the way. Less