This was published 3 months ago
Panic at the Pidapipo: How a Melbourne hospitality scion forged her own gelato empire
By Cara Waters
The night Lisa Valmorbida first opened her gelateria, Pidapipo, she lay down on the floor at the back of the shop, paralysed with fear.
“I was out the back on the floor and my mum came and my brother said, ‘Everyone’s out there’, because we invited all these people,” the 36-year-old says over lunch at Johnny’s Green Room on Lygon Street. “I just was so scared, I just couldn’t get off the floor. I’m like: ‘This is the most petrifying thing I’ve ever done in my life’.”
Lisa Valmorbida has lunch at Johnny’s Green Room in Carlton. Credit: Chris Hopkins
Eventually, she pulled herself off the floor and started serving gelati, and Valmorbida says after that initial moment of self-doubt, the positive feedback fortified her.
“It was such a great response from the start,” she says.“I built up my confidence from there.”
The pressure was on. Valmorbida knew, as one of the next generation of one of Melbourne’s wealthiest families, that she would be under additional scrutiny when she started her business 10 years ago.
Our lunch venue is part of the family business, which Valmorbida’s grandfather, Carlo Valmorbida, began when he bought Carlton’s King & Godfree in 1955 and turned it into a smallgoods shop selling Italian staples.
From this small shop, the family rose to the Rich List, and by the early 2000s, the Valmorbidas had amassed a reported $500 million empire by importing goods such as Lavazza coffee, tuna, wine and Parmesan.
Since then, the family has expanded further into hospitality, opening a restaurant as part of the revamped King & Godfree deli, with Johnny’s Green Room on the roof of the building.
“I actually genuinely love it, I’m not just trying to plug the family business,” Valmorbida says of Johnny’s Green Room, which has just been refurbished, with Karen Martini brought on as a culinary director.
She chooses some of her favourite foods from the menu for us to share, starting with zucchini fritte – wedges of deep-fried zucchini topped with cod roe, anchovies and dill.
Zucchini fritte at Johnny’s Green Room. Credit: Chris Hopkins
“They’re really yum,” Valmorbida says. “They’re like little pizzas.”
She gestures to me to start cutting into a large ball of burrata cheese, which oozes onto a plate of thickly sliced heirloom tomatoes.
Valmorbida started Pidapipo in 2013 after identifying a gap in the market in Melbourne for Italian-style gelato.
“There wasn’t much; it was all just the big mounds of gelati, industrial pastes, packaged fruits, artificial ingredients and all of that,” she says. “There wasn’t anyone that was doing it like they do in Italy.”
She has grown the business to three stores (in Carlton, Windsor and the CBD) along with the Pidapipo Laboratorio in Carlton, all of which she runs with her brother, Jamie Valmorbida.
Valmorbida was born in Melbourne, the middle child of John and Michelle Valmorbida, and while she attended the exclusive all-girls schools Loreto Mandeville Hall and St Catherine’s in Toorak, she also spent her summers working at King & Godfree.
“We all worked here on summer holidays,” she says. “I was behind the deli or stacking shelves, that sort of thing.”
Growing up, Valmorbida remembers visits to her grandparents’ home town in Italy, and large family gatherings with her extended Lebanese family on her mother’s side and her Italian family on her father’s side.
Calamari spiedini at Johnny’s Green Room. Credit: Chris Hopkins
“Food was massive in our family and everything revolved around food,” she says. “Mum and Dad both related through that a lot – although they were different cultures, they were very similar in terms of hospitality and food, and always having people over and the importance of food. So we were brought up with that same philosophy.”
We share a plate of golden yellow calamari spiedini, bouncy and crisp and doused in lemon juice.
When Valmorbida was growing up, the family’s favourite foods to make included Lebanese classics like vine rolls, labne made from strained yoghurt, and kibbeh (a mixture of bulgur wheat, onions, and minced beef); while on the Italian side of her family, Valmorbida’s nonna, Elsie, was the best at making gnocchi.
“Probably everyone says that about their nonna,” she laughs.
She started studying interior design at Monash University, but quickly realised her passion lay in food.
“I was just always obsessed with cooking and food, and always watching cooking shows and never doing my homework, but I never considered it as a career,” she says. “I just wasn’t feeling the interior design thing and just one day, I thought: ‘Maybe this can be my career, cooking’.”
Valmorbida says her parents have always been supportive, but when she announced she was quitting her interior design course to go to cooking school, they cautioned her.
“Both Mum and Dad have been amazing in that they’ve always let us follow our dreams and do whatever we want to do,” she says. “That was the first time they probably did say something like, ‘Are you sure you know what you’re getting yourself into? The most unglamorous, intense thing you can possibly choose?’”
Cousins Luca Sbardella, Jamie Valmorbida and Lisa Valmorbida at the King & Godfree deli and wine store in 2015.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
Despite their reservations, Valmorbida says her parents were still supportive, backing her to enrol in the Cordon Bleu course in Sydney.
Once there, she “loved every minute of it”, despite the teachers putting a lot of pressure on students to prepare them for fast-paced work in commercial kitchens.
“I remember one teacher always yelling at you to hurry up,” she says. “The teacher saying you’ll never last in the kitchen, in the real world.”
Part of the course involved doing work experience in a kitchen, so Valmorbida went to work at Donovans in St Kilda and stayed there for two years.
Heirloom tomato and burrata at Johnny’s Green Room. Credit: Chris Hopkins
“It’s 150 people at one time seated, so it is really intense and quite old-school in the way it is run,” she says. “Lots of pressure and don’t show your weakness and just get on with it and work 70-hour weeks and don’t have a day off, don’t complain, just get the work done and make sure it is perfect.”
But Valmorbida says when the opportunity came up to redevelop King & Godfree, she and her brother thought a gelateria would work well.
She found an Italian gelato school, Carpigiani Gelato University in Bologna, and went there to learn the skills and secrets of gelato-making.
“It was surreal,” she says. “The standard of what they were teaching you in the school was amazing. Italians, it is just part of their blood and there is no alternative to doing things in the best possible way.”
Valmorbida learnt the rules around how much fat, sugar and solids are used to achieve a gelato classification, and then set about getting some work experience at gelato stores in Italy.
“I came back [to Australia] and just knew this is what I wanted to do,” she says. “I just loved perfecting and obsessing over one concept and making it the very best.”
Valmorbida took the plunge and bought a gelato machine – which cost around $30,000 to $40,000 – and set about making eight initial flavours.
“It was a big commitment, and I was so young – it was pretty scary,” she says.
Pidapipo set itself apart with a Nutella fountain inspired by the chocolate fountains Valmorbida saw in Italy, and a “Nutella swirl” flavour that came about by accident when the store ran out of ingredients and Valmorbida cracked open some of the decorative tubs.
“It’s now such a key thing about what we do and our most popular flavour,” she says.
Valmorbida had to shepherd the business through Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdowns, relying on takeaway and delivery orders.
“As you go along, you learn and you get more confidence,” she says. “All of us are quite entrepreneurial. Dad definitely is, and then my sister, my brother and I are all very entrepreneurial. We’ve got strong opinions.”
We’re both full, but the dish we keep picking at is a creamy stracciatella cheese topped with wedges of cucumber and melon.
Cucumber and green melon at Johnny’s Green Room.Credit: Chris Hopkins
It’s refreshing and light on a warm day, and just the type of food Valmorbida wants to eat now that she’s pregnant with her first child.
“I love melon,” she says. “And now that I’m pregnant I’m just obsessed with fruit, all that I want is fruit.”
As we eat, she discusses the logistics of keeping her fast-growing business on track as she gets ready for life with a baby in tow.
“Now I’m just ready for it to all happen,” she says. “You are mentally just ready, you’ve had enough.”
When I next speak to Valmorbida, two weeks after the birth of her baby, she is on three months’ maternity leave, having handed the Pidapipo reins to her brother.
She says it’s hard to let go, even temporarily.
“I still get that, like, emotional feeling when I see that there’s a queue,” she says. “Even in winter, I think who are these people lining up in their winter coats and beanies eating gelato?”
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