Joe's

15/06/2026

Locals Night #65.
Wednesday 17 June.
Basil pesto crema.

This one’s for Charlotte’s birthday. 🎈

Charlotte and I have been friends for about 20 years, which is a terrifying sentence because it means we’re now old enough to say things like “remember when” and actually have it refer to multiple decades ago, several bad outfit trends, and a long list of decisions best left behind.

But here we are.

Still standing.
Still eating pasta.
Still pretending I know what I'm doing.

This week’s pasta is basil pesto crema. Nut free, because apparently we’re responsible adults now and have to think about these things instead of just throwing nuts into everything like it’s 2005 and nobody had a dietary requirement.

It’s basil, garlic, parmesan, olive oil, creaminess, and enough green energy to make you feel like you’ve made one good decision this week. Smooth, punchy, rich, a little bit of 'damn that was delicious'

Meanwhile, the world outside is still having a nervous breakdown.

Your phone is screaming.
Your inbox is multiplying.
Groceries cost more than your next holiday.
Someone online is explaining “what’s really going on” while sitting in their car eating servo sushi.
And every second influencer is trying to sell you peace, balance, and a morning routine while looking like they’ve never had to work a double shift in their life.

Hell nah.

Come eat pasta.

Free BYO.
All the sides.
$20 pasta.

And yes, there’s a gluten-free option. There always is. Don’t make me say it again.

Wednesday 17 June — from 5pm
Bookings essential
133 Main Road McLaren Vale
8323 8270
joesatsabella.com

Bring a bottle. Bring your mates. Bring whatever version of yourself survived the week.

We’ll feed it.

09/06/2026

Locals Night #64.
Wednesday 10 June.
Banana capsicum sugo.

Before anybody calls the police, no, there is no actual banana in the pasta.

Banana capsicums are those long, sweet, ever so slightly spicy (but not spicy) little yellow peppers that look like a banana after a rough divorce. We cook them down slowly until they surrender completely, fold them into a rich sugo, then throw the whole beautiful mess at a bowl of pasta.

Sweet. Savoury. A little bit smoky. A little bit not spicy. Deeply comforting in the way a proper meal should be when you’ve spent the week being emotionally mugged by adulthood.

Because life is strange enough already.

Your phone battery dies faster than your enthusiasm.
Your grocery bill now resembles a minor gambling debt.
You need seven separate passwords to do anything, and every single one of them apparently requires a capital letter, a number, a hieroglyph and the name of your first pet’s parole officer.

Then someone sends you a voice note that goes for four minutes.

What the helly.

Come eat pasta instead.

We’ve just turned Joe’s into a Mexican restaurant, yet every Wednesday we keep firing up an Italian side quest like a venue with a multiple-personality disorder and an unhealthy relationship with carbohydrates.

It makes no sense.
Neither does anything else.

Free BYO.
All the sides.
$20 pasta.

And yes, there’s a gluten-free option. There always is. You don’t need to submit a formal enquiry through the United Nations.

Wednesday 10 June — from 5pm
Bookings essential
133 Main Road McLaren Vale
8323 8270
joesatsabella.com

Bring a bottle. Bring a mate. Bring whichever exhausted version of yourself made it through the week without telling a stranger to get fu**ed.

We’ll take it from there
Come eat like you live here

01/06/2026

Locals Night #63.
Wednesday 3rd June
Parmesan cream.

So I survived the first weekend of the new Mexican Joe’s concept.

Barely.

For three days we baptised McLaren Vale in tequila, lime juice and the smell of grilled meat. Margaritas flew across the room like emergency supplies. Tacos disappeared faster than our remaining sense of optimism. Someone almost certainly woke up on Sunday morning with a sombrero-shaped gap in their memory and a bank statement that read like a cry for help.

Beautiful scenes.

Now Wednesday has rolled around, and we’re doing the only sensible thing after relaunching a Mexican restaurant inside an old church:

Serving pasta.

Because consistency is for accountants, sober people and businesses with a functional HR department.

This week: Parmesan cream.

Nothing clever. Nothing deconstructed. No culinary TED Talk delivered by a bloke with tweezers and a sleeve tattoo of a fish he’s never caught.

Just proper Parmesan cooked into a silky, salty, obscenely comforting sauce and wrapped around pasta until the whole thing becomes legally questionable.

The kind of bowl you eat slowly at first, then suddenly realise you’re hunched over it like a raccoon guarding a wheelie bin.

The world already asks too much of you.

Answer emails. Pay bills. Drink water. Maintain relationships. Pretend you understand why your lower back hurts now. Remember 14 different passwords. Smile politely while someone tells you a story with no ending.

F**k that.

On Wednesday, your responsibilities are reduced to:
sit down, pour wine, eat Pasta, order sides, stop talking for a minute, or 7.

Free BYO.
All the sides.
$20 pasta.

Wednesday 3 June — from 5pm
Bookings essential
133 Main Road McLaren Vale
8323 8270
joesatsabella.com

Joe’s is now Mexican.
Locals Night is still Italian.
Nobody knows what the f**k is going on.

That’s why it works.

27/05/2026

I'm not going to tell you how to eat it 🇲🇽

23/05/2026

Locals Night #62. Wednesday 27 May.
Roast tomato & silverbeet sugo.

We’ve been closed for a week turning Joe’s into a Mexican fever dream — tacos, tequila, margaritas, bad decisions, the whole beautiful circus — and now, like every overworked hospitality gremlin who said “I just need a little break,” we’re crawling back out of the renovation dust with sauce in our hair and a thousand-yard stare.

The world didn’t stop while we were gone. Of course it didn’t. The internet kept screaming. Influencers kept pretending their lives are casual while filming 19 takes of a coffee pour. Some bloke somewhere is still explaining “what’s really going on” into his phone from the driver’s seat of a Hilux like some overstimulated f**k. Everyone’s angry, everyone’s tired, everyone’s one bad email away from moving to the bush and raising goats.

So we made sugo.

Roast tomato. Silverbeet. Pasta.
Simple food for complicated people.

Tomatoes roasted until they stop being polite and start tasting like they’ve lived through something. Silverbeet folded through the sauce like the one responsible adult at a house party. It’s red, green, rustic, comforting, and has absolutely no interest in your wellness journey.

You’ve had a week. We’ve had a week. The whole planet looks like it needs a lie down and a glass of red.

So bring wine. Bring your mates. Bring whatever fragments of personality you’ve got left after pretending to be normal at work.

$20 pasta.
Free BYO.
All the sides.
Gluten free? Yes. It exists. It always exists. Vegan...yes. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.

Wednesday 27 May — from 5pm
133 Main Road McLaren Vale
8323 8270
joesatsabella.com

Joe’s is back. Sort of Italian. Sort of Mexican. Fully unstable.
Eat like you live here. Or keep doomscrolling until your soul turns into wet cardboard.

21/05/2026

Joe’s is closed for a week because we’ve decided to take the old concept out the back, give it a cigarette, thank it for the memories, and shoot it cleanly in the mozzarella.

The pizzas are done.

Not because we don’t love them.
We do.
Some of them were beautiful little bastards.

But McLaren Vale is currently one woodfired oven away from needing a support group, and frankly, we’d rather eat glass than become another beige pizza-and-pinot cuddle puddle for people named Lachlan wearing linen pants.

So we’re shutting the doors for a week and turning Joe’s into something far more dangerous.

A margarita Disneyland.

No cartoon mouse.
No princess castle.
No emotional families in matching shirts pretending Dad isn’t three Aperol spritzes away from divorce.

This is the adult version.

Tequila.
Mezcal.
Chilli.
Charcoal.
Tacos.
Aguachile.
Mole.
Lime juice in your eye.
Hot sauce on your shirt.
One frozen marg too many and suddenly you’re telling your mate you’ve “always loved them” next to the EFTPOS machine.

Taco José has escaped the courtyard and started dry-humping the main dining room.

He’s bringing his more refined aunty with him too — the sexy one with gold jewellery, questionable stories, and the ability to make you feel poor just by lighting a cigarette.

She’s not here to f**k around with ham and pineapple discourse.

She’s here for:
cold drinks, loud flavour, smoky meat, sharp acid, bad decisions, and the sort of service that makes you feel like you accidentally joined a cult with better glassware.

We’ll be closed for one week while we paint, scrub, swear, overthink fonts, move furniture four centimetres to the left, argue about lighting like absolute psychopaths, and taste-test enough margaritas to legally qualify as a workplace hazard.

When we reopen, Joe’s will still be Joe’s.

Same address.
Same church.
Same weird little soul.

Just less Italy.
More Mexico City.
More chaos.
More tequila.
More “f**k it, let’s order another round.”

Back soon.

Pray for us.
Or don’t.
We’ll be drinking either way.

17/05/2026

16/05/2026

ICONIC MCLAREN VALE VENUE DITCHES PIZZA FOR TACOS: If authentic tacos, spicy margs and guacamole with a caviar kick sound like your ideal day, then there's a revamped McLaren Vale venue calling your name >> https://ap1.hubs.ly/y0RSsX0

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10/05/2026

Locals Night #60.
Two weeks of carbonara. Again.

And before some bloke named Brayden from the suburbs has a cardiac event in the comments section:

No cream.
No peas.
No f**ken chicken.

Just pasta, pepper, egg, pecorino, pancetta and whatever remaining faith we have in humanity.

Somewhere along the line people started treating carbonara like a therapy session. Throwing cream in there, mushrooms, garlic, probably f**king kale by now. Give it another 10 years and some influencer with lip filler will be making “wellness carbonara” with oat milk and cashew bacon while standing in a beige kitchen explaining how Italy “needed a fresh perspective.”

Shut the f**k up.

This is the real thing. Salty, silky, dangerous if you wear black. The kind of pasta that doesn’t need a backstory or a TED Talk. It just lands on the table and handles business.

Two weeks only because frankly we don’t have the emotional stamina to explain this for any longer.

Outside the restaurant:

* the world’s still cooked
* politicians still lying (honestly f**k trump)
* billionaires still cosplaying as astronauts
* influencers still filming themselves pretending to wake up naturally at sunrise

Meanwhile you’re one unread email away from moving into the bush and communicating only through smoke signals.

Come eat carbonara.

No booking algorithms. No manifestation seminars. No “disrupting the dining space.” Just a bowl of pasta and a room full of people trying to survive modern life without becoming completely unbearable.

$25 this week because pancetta costs money and integrity isn’t cheap. Yes f**king yes we have vegan/vego/gluten free f**k your life story.

Free BYO.
All the sides.
Wednesday from 5pm.

133 Main Road McLaren Vale
8323 8270
joesatsabella.com

Eat like you live here.
Or go put chicken in carbonara and see if God forgives you.

09/05/2026

Second last weekend of these icons before we go 🇲🇽🌮🍸