Grossi, Galletto, Talimanidis and Favaro families serve up the new generation
Their parents want them to succeed outside the restaurant trade, but there’s no escaping their Euro culinary roots.
Think of your accountant’s name, or that of your doctor, lawyer or school principal. Greek or Italian, by any chance?
The drive for a better life, education and a profession for the next generation has driven Australia’s European immigration narrative since the last great war, and for the baby boomers who grew up here things were no different in their ambition for their children.
A comfortable, class-free suburban home life, a good education, the opportunity to advance into even greater “respectability” — the kids had it all. Yet, somehow, they continue to fall through the cracks. These are the “European” Australians who can’t help but follow their folks into the restaurant game.
While in Europe the path back to the family business is well-trodden, it is a far less common phenomenon in the new world.
We talked with a few exceptions.
Carlo Grossi, 28, Ombra, Melbourne. “I was given every opportunity to do something else,” says Carlo Grossi, a young man burdened, or blessed, with a big name in his hometown Melbourne courtesy of his father, energetic chef restaurateur Guy Grossi. “I guess I was either doomed or destined.” Grossi Jr runs the family’s wine and salumi bar, Ombra, in Bourke Street, an offshoot of the three-restaurant Florentino mothership.
“I was certainly encouraged to do a lot of different things when I finished school,” he says, “but ultimately I realised that I’d always been in love with what we do.”
Grossi finished high school at a prestigious Melbourne boys school and enrolled at university, working part time at one of the family’s restaurants, Mirka. The shifts became more frequent as he realised his heart “just really wasn’t in the study”.
“It was very much understood I should finish the degree,” he says. “It was made clear that coming into the business wasn’t going to be easy.”
Nine years later, he manages part of the Grossi business and has become more involved since the relaunch of the Florentino grill in February.
His parents opened Cafe Grossi in 1988, the year Carlo was born. “From the day dot, I’ve always been in and around restaurants,” he says. “Our family life was always very intertwined with restaurant life.”
His grandfather, Pietro, came to Australia as an immigrant chef in 1960. Ombra — separate yet connected to the Florentino hub — was an idea he was involved in conceiving.
“Dad and I, we’re best friends … we spitball a lot of ideas and talk about business, the future, problem solving,” says Carlo. We work very closely together.”
He makes the point that while many of his peers from school are looking at their careers in 10-year blocks, he knows this is his future. “I guess I love delivering hospitality. People have a limited time with you [in the restaurant] but you can make all the difference.”
Matteo Galletto, 31, Capriccio, Sydney. Lucio Galletto is never happy. First, his boy Matteo doesn’t finish university, despite having a first-class independent school education in inner Sydney. Then Matteo disappears to Italy for a year, discovering the magic of restaurant life. Then, 10 years later, when he has finally mastered the family business (Paddington institution Lucio’s), he buggers off to Leichhardt to open his own place, Capriccio.
“There was never talk of it, my going into the business,” Matteo says of his adolescence. “I think Dad had more ideas about what I’d do [in my career] — he was not super happy.”
As a young man, Matteo was intimidated by Lucio’s: “The actors and politicians — it was all taken very seriously.” That was until, aged 21, he went to Liguria for a year to work in his uncle’s restaurant, Ciccio, in the seasonal coastal town of Bocca di Magra. It excited him.
“All of Dad’s family, grandfather and uncles … pretty much every family member was involved in the restaurant,” he says. “In season, seven days a week, everyone just lived and breathed that restaurant. Being part of it, hearing the stories and getting to know the family … It made me appreciate what dad does and his work ethic.” He returned a convert.
At University of NSW, Galletto had changed subjects a lot, unsure of direction. “The first thing that really did click for me was restaurants.” The next 10 years were spent working through the ranks at his parents’ famed restaurant, learning management, wine, teams. “But I kind of found myself not pushing myself, in a bit of a rut.” He and a colleague, Michele Rispoli, started looking for premises of their own. Capriccio, which opened in September last year, is the result.
“Now I miss Lucio’s,” he says. “I walk in and I know how it works, the customers, the staff … Capriccio has been a huge learning curve.”
Dominic Talimanidis, 29, and Alex Talimanidis, 34, Ipsos, Lorne. “Yes,” says Dominic Talimanidis, another who shoulders the weight of a renowned name in hospitality, particularly on Victoria’s Surf Coast. “I’m another of those silly buggers who didn’t follow his parents’ advice.”
Those parents are Kosta and Pam Talimanidis, founders of institutions Kosta’s Taverna and A la Grecque, both on the Great Ocean Road.
Still, Dominic did the right thing for a while. He finished his secondary education at a boarding school, did a bachelor of arts at University of Melbourne, a masters of international relations at Monash, and worked at think tank the Institute of Public Affairs for three years. It was a fellowship to study entrepreneurship in Australia that “rekindled my thinking about what I was doing with my life”.
All of a sudden, a whole lot of ducks lined up. Around a table in Greece last year — an annual Talimanidis ritual — the family, including older brother Alex, a chef and partner with his parents at A la Grecque, discussed the future of the now-vacant property that had housed Kosta’s under different owners in Lorne. A plan was hatched.
Ipsos opened in November with the over-qualified Dom out front, career chef Alex in the kitchen and a lot of fingers crossed. “Someone described it as jumping out of a plane and hoping the parachute will open,” says Dom who, with his fiancee, quit the city for the town in which he grew up. “Despite the [December] fires we’ve come through really well. Much busier than expected, a really gratifying experience.”
He puts his change of life down to many factors: a desire to return to the coast; to emulate his parents’ lifestyle; to work in an environment he has been associated with all his life; to put some business theory into play.
And to address the inevitable issue of succession planning. “We both want them to be around these businesses for as long as they’re capable and happy,” Dom says of Kosta and Pam. “They immerse themselves in the business … it’s built around their day-to-day involvement. We need to look into ways of developing the two businesses but in a slightly different way. It’s difficult because being on call is what we know.”
Nick Favaro, 26, and Jess Favaro, 28, Bar Torino, Adelaide. If you’re going to have a few professionals on your books, you could do a whole lot worse than an accountant or a lawyer. Adelaide’s Bar Torino has both.
Nick Favaro and his sister Jessica pursued professions after high school: he studied accountancy and worked as an accountant for several years, while she did a double degree in law and behavioural science at Flinders University.
They were typically aspirational second-generation Australians, the educated offspring of restaurateurs. Yet, having grown up in Adelaide’s long-established Chianti restaurant, first in Light Square, then Hutt Street, the children of Maria and Frank Favaro matured with an in-built affection for the hospitality game.
“I think it’s in your blood, whether you enjoy being around people,” says Jessica, the co-owner of Bar Torino, next door to her parents’ 30-something fine diner. She never actually got around to pursuing her profession. “It started with a few shifts once I finished university and four years later I was still there,” she says.
“I mean, I started out looking for legal work, sending out resumes, but I really started to enjoy what I was doing at the restaurant … I guess my heart really wasn’t in the applications I was sending out and in the end I said to myself ‘I’m enjoying this way too much’. An office job just seemed farther and farther away.”
Her parents, she says, “were quite shocked I decided not to pursue a profession but they’ve always been really supportive and basically just said ‘whatever makes you happy’ ”.
Frank had always wanted a separate casual bar; Bar Torino was conceived over a father-son beer one night, and Nick resigned from the accountancy practice next day. He subsequently went to Spain to research and refine ideas he had for an Italian Spanish crossover bar. Then two months before the bar was about to open, he went to Jess and said: “I think I need some help.”
She walked from Chianti to the building site next door and hasn’t looked back; Torino opened in February last year.
“It’s a new page, a new book, that we got to write,” she says. “In Italy, if you’re born into it, there’s an expectation, almost, that you’ll continue in the family business. It’s different here, but for us, well, I think we’ve been lucky.”