I Can’t Stop Thinking About: The Ludicrously Large $17 Lasagne at The Bat & Ball Hotel

A few months ago, I met my forever lasagne.

I always want it. I always crave it. And whenever I eat a slice, it makes me dissociate so hard that I end up just gawking at my plate. It’s a glorious performance of pasta, meat sauce, bechamel and cheese that plays out every night at The Bat & Ball, Redfern’s favourite new pub. But everyone orders it on Tuesdays. Because Tuesday is $17 lasagne night.

“We wanted to do a pasta night where we just nailed the same really solid pasta every week, so we chose lasagne,” chef and co-owner Cameron Votano tells me. “We didn’t expect it to take off like it has – now I think there’d be an uproar if it left the menu.”

Votano tinkered with nearly 30 iterations of this famously wintry dish before he put it on the menu just before the start of summer. And its word-of-mouth notoriety just keeps growing. “People that would normally come here for a steak or parmie are being won over to the lasagne side.”

So why does this lasagne have such a large fan club? As a superfan, I think it’s because every single one of its cast members, regardless of how substantial their role, brings their absolute A-game. As they say, there are no small parts, only small actors.

Take the ragu. The sauce features Whole Beast Butchery’s dry-aged beef mince, supported by pork and fennel sausages, minced chorizo and diced pancetta. After they’ve caramelised in the oven for a half-hour, the meats join the sauce, where they lose their individual identities, coalescing into a seamless blend of meaty homogeny. You don’t know where beef starts and pork ends. You don’t care. It’s protein alchemy.

The ragu’s acidity is dialled up, courtesy of litres of wine and an abundance of San Marzano tomatoes. Votano upped the tang factor so the ragu’s voice wouldn’t get drowned out by its carby, creamy, cheesy neighbours. That acid – plus fun additions like shaved fennel in the mirepoix and bunches of fresh basil at the end – ensures that never happens.

The sauce’s acidity isn’t the only thing counterbalancing the cheese and pasta. The side salad could get its own essay. It’s a mesclun mix of rocket, sorrel and red elk mustard leaves, laced with pickled red onions and dressed in a cottonseed oil, Dijon and champagne vinegar emulsion. Its sweet brininess cleanses your palette and helps you temporarily turn into a lasagne-deleting machine.

The ragu – and hell, even the salad – might be overdosing on main character energy, but the bechamel puts in a more subtle performance. Bechamel in a lasagne is mortar in a brick wall – no one cares about it, but if it’s bad the whole thing falls apart.

Here it’s a perfectly executed trad bech packed with nutmeg and white pepper, with sweet-spot viscosity, piped onto the lasagne.

Then there’s the co-starring cheeses: Emilgrana (a parmesan doppelganger) and good old shredded mozzarella. One provides the sharpness, the other provides the stretch.

I love how big this lasagne is. I’ve had my heart broken – and fingers burned – by too many tiny lasagnes served to me in piping hot, ramekin-sized mini-pans. So like any sane person, last time I ordered the Bat & Ball’s, I measured it. At 17 centimetres long, 10 centimetres wide and three centimetres tall, this robust rectangle is thick enough to stop a heavy door. That gives you just over 500 cubic centimetres of lasagne. I dare you to find another slice in Sydney of this quality, value, heft and girth.

More lasagne maths for you: the boozer’s oven fits 10 Gastronorm trays. Each tray holds a 12-slice lasagne, for a maximum production of 120 slices at one time. On Lasagne Tuesdays, the pub sells at least 60 slices. Five lasagnes are ready to go from the start of service, and five or six par-baked lasagnes hang out in the fridge, ready to be called from the bench at a moment’s notice. This gives us a maximum of 144 slices per service. On non-lasagne days (where a slice will set you back, in my opinion, a still-very-reasonable $27), there’s always at least four lasagnes on hand, too.

This is all to say: if you come here, they will have a slice of lasagne for you.

There are 16 gorgeous layers in the Bat & Ball’s lasagne, but my favourite one is the glorious, glossy top layer of cheese – coated in those classic scorched-marshmallow leopard spots. It’s the perfect crescendo to a perfect dish, coming out of a pub kitchen that puts the rest of Sydney’s nightly specials to shame.

Whatever plans you had next Tuesday, reschedule them and go to the Bat & Ball instead. Lasagnes, like onions and ogres, have layers. And this one is much more layered than most.

@thebatandballhotel