When I was new to Melbourne, it was Pellegrini's that welcomed me

Each city has its unique access point – when you stop being a stranger and are merged from them to us, as seamlessly as changing lanes on a highway.

Of course it doesn’t feel that seamless at first, when you are a them, a country kid freshly moved to the city and sure that everything from your length of socks to shade of lipstick to broadness of your accent marks you as an outsider.

When you are 18 and away from home for the first time, everyone talks about rebellion. But there is still the strong residue of needing permission. Only a few months ago, sitting in class, you had to get a teacher’s permission to go to the bathroom. Now, in a new city, there is a latent hesitancy, a foot behind the threshold.

First, almost unconsciously, you need someone of the city to open the door, look you in the eye and say “You can come in.”

I remember, before I left home, a friend of my mother’s talking about a night out in Melbourne. She was a Melbourne woman, and it would not have been a necessarily memorable night for her, but – decades later – I still recall her talking about it because it seemed not just emblematic of a certain Melbourne character, but also deeply enchanting.

She had gone to the theatre with friends, then taken a tram up Bourke Street and gone to Pellegrini’s for a late supper. They were invited to sit in the back room. There was a large table there and sometimes they opened it to guests. You could peer into the front bar, the waiters would weave around you, speaking Italian and carrying plates out pasta to the front.

“It was like being an Italian family’s kitchen,” she said.

To my hopelessly provincial ears, I’d never heard anything so glamorous. Pellegrini’s, before I had even been, became a place I would go when I became the Melbourne person I wanted to be.

I was aged 19 when a friend’s older brother took us there for coffee and a pasta lunch to celebrate the end of exams. Sisto and his family working behind the bar slung us enormous plates of pasta with crusty plates of bread (which also provincially, I fretted about: I did not order the bread, would I have to pay for it?).

The curved neon sign and the bar stools, the mirrors and the never-changing menu carved in wood by the clock, the folded copies of the Age and Herald Sun by the door, the way that everyone there seemed to be a regular, part of the same extended family – all seemed the height of worldliness.

Would I ever be at ease as the people sitting at the front bar of Pellegrini’s, unselfconsciously saying “Pronto?” But I wanted to be. All of life was up that end of Bourke Street. Hill of Content and Paperback books, Florentino’s and the Cellar Bar, Spaghetti Tree, Spleen and Meyers Place bar, the Palace, the Windsor hotel.

But Pellegrini’s was the most egalitarian entry point. You could sit and admire the shade and shadow of the Bourke Street plane trees for the price of a coffee. The welcome I got that first time – and every time – was effusive, the staff greeting us in Italian.

For those of us who came from somewhere else, Pellegrini’s (more so than the MCG, Melbourne’s official church) became that place where we merged lanes, travelling from them to us.

Sisto and his family stamped my passport.

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• Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia writer and columnist