Inside Maurice Terzini’s pressure-cooker world

Maurice Terzini’s ambitious renovation of one of Australia’s most iconic restaurants is a mess and months behind. Can the king of cool bring order to the chaos?

Maurice Terzini at Icebergs in Bondi. Picture: Nic Walker

The upside-down version of Sydney’s world-famous Bondi Beach has slate-grey skies and drizzle, clumpy wet sand and surfers in wetsuits. It’s more glum than glam and, on a soggy spring Thursday, as the city officially logs its wettest year on record, the sense of a cosmos awry extends to the world-famous beach’s world-famous edifice: Icebergs Dining Room and Bar.

Perched iconically above the southern end sea baths, the modernist glass box holds a special place in the cultural landscape of Sydney, and therefore the nation. For two decades, the postcard-from-paradise location has seduced models, musicians and artists, beachgoers in boardies, special-occasion sweethearts, boardroom big shots, and royalty. Leo, Oprah, Kylie, Nic. Princess Mary. The Packers. It’s hosted flash mobs and fashion shows. Waiters – waiters! – swing from the chandeliers on New Year’s Day.

But today the world’s out of whack. No waiters, no chandeliers. No sunshine and no restaurant. Icebergs is undergoing an ambitious $1.3 million renovation, the first in its 20-year history, and the upside-down version is a construction site. A small army of workers wields hammers and buzz saws amid spaghetti loops of ceiling wires, plaster-spackled walls and plastic tarps flapping in a gale shrieking in off the Pacific. Most jarring of all is the owner himself, hobbling into view on a cane.

This is Maurice Terzini, king of cool, the heart and soul of Bondi, the black-clad, Melbourne-born, second-generation Italian whose restless energy has seen him open countless restaurants, cafes and bars from Byron to Bali. The 58-year-old invented the notion of perfectionist punk, blending an intense work ethic with a tilt towards anarchy, and his distinctive style forms a locus around which the country’s hippest creatives orbit. “He’s like the Pied Piper,” says Sneaky Sound System’s Angus McDonald, a long-time friend. “He just does whatever he wants and people follow.”

“I’m a bit stressed,” Terzini admits, with the renovation lagging months behind. Picture: Nic Walker

Terzini is typically a blur of perpetual motion, an uncompromising, unpredictable, unsinkable machine, but not today. “I’ve hurt my damn back,” he explains, just before stepping in a puddle of grey gloop with his thousand-dollar Boris Saberi high-tops. It gets worse. He’s juggling several new projects, including the revival of Sydney CBD bar Jacksons on George and Belongil Beach Italian Food in Byron Bay, and there are others in the works: a second Byron eatery, a basement bar called The Purple Pit and a new live music venue in Melbourne. A book commemorating Iceberg’s 20th anniversary is on the way.

Now this epic renovation, which began in May, is lagging nearly two months behind. Approvals predictably dragged, then high-knot winds postponed a total roof replacement, with rain delays rippling through the gyprocking, plumbing and wiring. October, which was fully booked, has nearly come and gone and opening has been pushed back to December, which means he’ll lose another month of revenue and miss the lucrative Melbourne Cup lunch crowd. Everything’s on hold, including his wedding – at Icebergs – to goth-luxe jewellery designer Emma Addams. And. It. Will. Not. Stop. Raining. “I’m a bit stressed,” he admits.

Still, Terzini has weathered worse storms. In the late 2000s, a portfolio of eight restaurants shrank to just one, before he regrouped and soared again. He came from nothing, which makes him unafraid. He’s survived lockout laws, Covid closures, staff shortages and fractured alliances. Just last year, Cucina Povera, a hyped 40-seat ­Italian diner in Melbourne, closed after less than a month amid rumours of a falling out with his co-owner, chef Joseph Vargetto.

Things go right for Terzini and then they go spectacularly wrong. They go wrong and then they go very, very right. So you know he will bring order to this chaos. It’s what he does.

As well as restaurants, Terzini is a partner in two fashion labels. Picture: Nic Walker

The revival of Sydney CBD bar Jacksons on George and Belongil Beach Italian Food in Byron Bay are just two of his new projects. Picture: Nic Walker

A colleague hustles in brandishing a powerful anti-inflammatory, and within minutes it’s worked its magic. The old Terzini is back, unshakeable, unsinkable, and soon he’s making his way through the upside-down Icebergs in a flurry of enthusiasm and F-bombs. There’ll be a lobster tank here. Hand-painted tiles from Florence over there. A bigger kitchen and a new-look terrace and a Derek Henderson ­photograph at reception and “unbelievable” new iGuzzini lighting design. The rain’s coming in fast now, slamming into windows from a cloud-choked sky, but Terzini sees a bright new horizon. His words conjure it into being and by tour’s end, he’s positively buoyant. The cane is mere decoration now, swinging from his right pinkie finger, at the end of one riotously tattooed arm.

The world can be a muddled and unlovely and sometimes waterlogged place, but inside one of Terzini’s soothingly refined venues you’d never know. From the moody, urban swank of the Melbourne Wine Room to well-loved Sydney eateries such as Otto, North Bondi Italian and The Dolphin, from founding unisex fashion label Ten Pieces to collaborating on RE, an ambitious, “no-waste” Sydney cocktail bar, Terzini’s always two steps ahead of the in-crowd. He calls what he does “vibe dining” and each venue adheres to a finely honed narrative. Belongil Beach is “Ibiza on a skateboard”, for example. The Purple Pit will be “the American Bar at the Savoy goes punk”. And Icebergs “is just all about invisibility,” he says. That diva ocean view takes centre stage, as waitstaff in white glide cat-like to and fro.

It’s theatre, he’s an entertainer, and why shouldn’t dining be fun? “I’ve always had this ­philosophy, it’s a very Italian philosophy, that says you eat really well and then you dance,” he says.

Terzini opened his first venue in 1988, a tiny Melbourne eatery called Caffe e Cucina, staffed exclusively by post-punk Italo-Australians like himself. He was just 23, but his hospitality career really began at the age of 13, waiting tables in his father Arnaldo’s cafe in the coastal town of Pescara, in Italy’s Abruzzo region. The sparkling teal blue of the Adriatic Sea was not dissimilar to Bondi.

Renders reveal how the new terrace will look at Icebergs.

Arnaldo and his wife Gina, a hairdresser, had migrated to Melbourne but struggled to assimilate. The family oscillated between the two countries, and Terzini wound up spending his impressionable teen years in 1970s Italy, a time of roiling social unrest and political rebellion. For Terzini, it was more about subversive expressionism and the giddiness of the disco era. “It was a wild political and cultural time and it influenced my approach to everything I do,” he says.

Caffe e Cucina arrived in Australia at a time when Italian cuisine meant something called “mixed pasta”, often slapped on a plate in the red, white and green of the Italian flag. Cucina was young, hot and defiantly anti-establishment, “a way for us to show our pride in being second-­generation Italians,” he says. The New York Times ranked it among the 10 best cafes in the world, and Terzini went on to help shape a new style of modern Italian dining, creating concepts so strong they often endure long after he’s moved on.

The narrative for the short-lived Cucina ­Povera, influenced by the “migrant garage culture” he and Vargetto grew up with, was “one of the greatest of all time,” he says. “But there were a couple of signs and both of us just went, ‘I can’t work with you, you can’t work with me’. That was a let-down because I really, really wanted that one to work.”

No two Terzini venues look the same but he likes to say each has his DNA, from artisanal ­cutlery to bespoke staff uniforms. “He’s got a really distinctive style and flavour that he brings to everything he touches,” says Vogue Australia ­editor-in-chief Edwina McCann. “The look’s ­simple, pared-back, with a lot of attention to ­quality. Primarily, I would say it’s cool.”

The restaurant under construction during refurbishment in 2022. Photo: Supplied

Terzini is surrounded by a network of pioneering creatives who cross-pollinate across ventures, exerting outsized influence over the nation’s aesthetics. “I find there are a lot of restaurants in this country that are really beautiful, but they die with their clients,” he says. “The clients get old and the restaurants get old and then they just close. Maybe it’s just because of my punk upbringing, but we have a very close connection to music, fashion and art and that keeps us youthful. We tend to work a lot with young people and we do take a lot of risks.” Risk-taking welcomed by Alex Prichard, who started at Icebergs in 2014 and was made head chef three years later. “Who else in their right mind would hand over their two-hat restaurant to a 23-year-old?” Prichard says.

Terzini on the balcony at Icebergs. Picture: Nic Walker

Terzini swam against the tide in 2002 when he hired a Melburnian to steer the fledgling Icebergs as its first executive chef. He’d worked with Karen Martini at Melbourne Wine Room and credits her with “opening up my world to a more Mediterranean-style cuisine”. “Up to that point, all I did was carry the Italian flag, it was all Italy, Italy, Italy,” he says. “But I started to embrace the fact I’d been here [in Australia] longer than I’d lived in Italy.” The two developed a clear brief that now underpins all his venues: classically simple dishes made from fresh Australian produce handled with true Italian feeling. Martini quickly embraced the bright optimism of the oceanfront locale, cooking grilled lobster with tarragon and crab and zucchini-flower risotto. Chefs have come and gone over 20 years – “some got it straight away, others took a bit longer to find their feet” – but the brief hasn’t changed. “I want my mother to come in, recognise the flavours and go, ‘Buono!’ ” he says.

Collaborations are bedrock to Terzini’s empire. He found success right away with Ten Pieces, the avant-garde fashion label he went on to run with former partner Lucy Hinckfuss, with whom he has two sons, Cesare, eight, and Leo, four. (He has another son, Sylvester, 30, from a previous relationship.) “He created a really distinctive brand, really, really quickly and that’s not something that everyone can just do,” says McCann. “It’s certainly not something that most restaurateurs could do.” Terzini has a second fashion label, Nonplus, with Gareth Moody, a founding partner of Tsubi, and a gin label, Goldy, with fashion designer Justin O’Shea. And he’s soon to join his new bride on a jewellery collection for her cult brand Heart of Bone, a favourite of Billie Eilish and worn by Courtney Love, Daphne Guinness and Jean Paul Gaultier.

Maurice Terzini found success with his label Ten Pieces. Picture: Nic Walker

One of his most famous collaborations is the annual New Year’s Day party, which began the year Icebergs opened. Terzini brought in dance-pop locals Sneaky Sound System to play to a ­couple of hundred friends. “It was really not a VIP party... it was just people that we knew,” says Sneaky Sound System’s McDonald. People like Owen Wilson, Nicole Kidman, Paris Hilton and her then-assistant Kim Kardashian. The invite-only bacchanal remained intimate and became a staple of the Sydney social calendar, but it will wind up with one last shebang at the newly renovated ­Icebergs this January 1. “Parties don’t really kick around for 20 years, do they, so it’s time to send it on its merry way,” says McDonald.

Terzini seems genuinely perplexed by the notion that people think his venues, Icebergs in particular, are celebrity-centric and inaccessible. “Yeah, I’ve heard that,” he says. “But we’re the complete opposite. I’m a f..king socialist for Christ’s sake.” He prides himself on making the exclusive feel inclusive; small tables, for example, are a ­signature across his venues, bringing people together so they’re almost touching.

Terzini considers himself the “custodian” of the Icebergs restaurant, which occupies the top floor of a three-level site built on crown land over­looking the heritage-listed Bondi Baths. In the late 1990s, advertising baron John Singleton rescued the 30-year-old Icebergs Club, which was riddled with concrete cancer. He sold a lease over the entire property for $15 million in 2018 to the ­privately owned Melbourne-based O’Brien Group. Terzini – together with hotelier Damien Reed and former publishing magnate Deke Miskin – holds a sublease until 2036. “Part of our mission ­statement goes back to the original brief from the lease: that we have to provide service to a variety of incomes and everyone should be welcomed,” he says. “We’ve always maintained the bar at a cheaper price point so you can have a plate of pasta and a glass of chilled red wine for under $40.”

Not everyone appreciates this egalitarian outlook. Some “very political” neighbours on Notts Ave, the cliffside cul-de-sac where a three-bedroom apartment recently sold for $24 million, raised objections when Terzini first lodged a development proposal with Waverley Council in 2020. “Everyone loves to have an image of the Icebergs up on the billboard when they sell their property,” he says, “but no one wants the garbage bins, you know?” He’s since amended the proposal.

Terzini is far from a name-dropper, unless it’s that of a sommelier he admires or a specialist farmer producing organic koshihikari rice for a mum-approved risotto. Some diners are household names, but these are just people he grew up with. He knows Kylie Minogue from her Neighbours years, Nick Cave from Melbourne’s 1980s post-punk scene. Jimmy Barnes and filmmakers Philip Noyce and Fred Schepisi are among the many ­clients who became friends. “He has a great way of making you feel at home,” says Schepisi. “When I first used to go to Sydney, restaurant staff were often quite haughty and disapproving of your choices, but Maurice was schooled in the Melbourne way of running restaurants and he always makes it just a joy to be there.”

Renders of Bondi Icebergs restaurant new refurbishment.

Of course, it takes more than flair and a warm personality to beat the notoriously long odds and carve out a successful three-decade career in ­hospitality. Terzini’s secret is no secret at all: hard work. Like the swan that presents unruffled chic on the surface but is paddling like crazy beneath, all that effortless cool is driven by a six-cylinder engine. Before it was forbidden to say such things, restaurant critic Pat Nourse described Terzini as “ticcing around” his clifftop fiefdom “like some genius hospitality Touretter”. Even now, when he only rarely appears on the floor, his alarm goes off at 12 noon and 6pm every day, 365 days a year. It’s when lunch and dinner service start.

Terzini’s innate regard for hospitality translates into a sophisticated courtesy, a formal yet relaxed style of service that ranges across his venues. “We have a very old-school philosophy about service,” he says. “Part of our waitering style is don’t talk unless you’re spoken to, just take the order. And don’t kneel down at a table. Stand up! You’re a waiter. Nothing embarrassing about it.”

During the pandemic lockdowns, Terzini went into his office every day, even while his restaurants were shuttered. “No one was around, everyone was at home, so I was in the office trying to work out what to do next,” he says. “Just reading, researching, developing menus and drinks, trying to formulate new business plans. I felt that if I wasn’t present, I wasn’t making enough effort for my business, and I would feel a sense of failure.”

The decision was made early on not to join the numerous restaurants pivoting to takeaway. “To open the doors here is $10,000,” he says. “It’s a big restaurant with big rent, and to fire it up is expensive. We decided just to maintain our cash reserves, which is what got us through in the end.”

Terzini has perfected a fashion-forward ­“uniform”: drop-crotch pants, cashmere T-shirts and oversized sneakers. Occasionally, he’ll add a pair of sky-high Perspex heels or an oversized cape, ­particularly when visiting Melbourne, but his ensembles tend to be black in accordance with the goth-meets-Mad-Max aesthetic of his go-to designer, Rick Owens. And yet he doesn’t believe in dress codes. “Be stylish or don’t be stylish,” he says. “Wear whatever you want, who cares?”

The look may be outre, says McDonald, but his friend is fastidious, with an unflagging attention to detail. “Some days he likes all the salt and pepper shakers facing northeast, other days it’s south,” he says. “And I’ve seen him absolutely lose it if the shakers don’t face a certain way or the blinds have been opened seven-eighths of the way instead of, you know, two thirds. I’m talking that level of detail.” Terzini is, decides McDonald, an enigma. How else to explain his decision, in 2008, to open a restaurant – Giuseppe, Arnaldo & Sons – on the promenade at Melbourne’s Crown Casino, a ­complex whose opening he had taken to the streets to protest in 1994? “James [Packer] asked me and it just f..king ticked every box,” he says. He’s a socialist. But he’s also a realist.

“Be stylish or don’t be stylish. Wear whatever you want, who cares?”

It’s a sparkling day in Rome when Carl­Pickering calls Sydney. “Oh, is it still raining over there?” he says wickedly. The architect, one half of Rome-based practice Lazzarini Pickering Architetti, designed the original Icebergs as a love letter to his hometown of Sydney and a “site-specific portrait” of Terzini. The firm also did the redesign. “All ­Maurice’s ­previous restaurants were dark and urban,” says Pickering. “That was the aesthetic and also his way of life, so he felt slightly out of place when he had that view to deal with. But that’s what he’s good at; he creates unique places, and now it’s a very ­Maurice space. It’s Maurice at the beach.”

Pickering and Terzini spent months studying the different moods of the ocean, honing an interior palette to sit precisely on a continuum between green and blue. “We’re proud artisans like Maurice is,” Pickering says. “I’ve always admired his contemporary reinterpretation of classic hospitality and the way he makes it relevant to the time.”

Terzini took an enormous risk in 2002, selling his stake in the successful Otto to pour it all into Icebergs, which cost $3 million to get up and ­running, and pinning his already formidable ­reputation on its success. Twenty years on, the fine diner is widely regarded as one of the most beautiful restaurants in the world and only the Sydney Opera House rivals the building for Australia’s most photographed. It hasn’t dated, merely faded and wearied a bit, too well-loved on the inside and battered by the elements from without. “We counted 47 leaks the last week of service,” says Terzini. “It was at the point where the more you tried to repair things the harder it was, so we just ripped it all out.” And the facilities needed to evolve. The kitchen, for example, was catering to double the numbers for which it was designed. “It was literally a Fiat pulling a Mack truck,” he says.

The works are a restoration, really, rather than a renovation. “We are restoring Icebergs back to its former glory,” he says. Just before going to press, an official announcement: the restaurant will open December 14, 20 years to the day since it first opened. It’s as if he planned it.

Icebergs, the modernist glass box perched iconically above the southern end sea baths, holds a special place in the cultural landscape of Sydney

Terzini’s Bondi adventure is, in some ways, the story of Bondi itself. His arrival coincided with the clean-up of the notorious sewage outfall at nearby Ben Buckler Point, which paved the way for the suburb’s gentrification, and he brought with him an influx of inner-city creatives. “I would say he almost created the Bondi scene,” says McCann. “It was a surfie culture and he made it sort of cool and hip.” And Bondi gave back. “The ocean was really good to me,” he says. “It gave me back a ­little bit of life that I didn’t have. I worked at night before Icebergs – I didn’t go to bed until 4am – so coming to Bondi gave me that nice balance. I started to enjoy daylight a bit more.”

He’s watched with mixed feelings as the suburb has changed. “It’s still got the lot – gay, straight, young, old, Jewish, Italian – but it’s lost a bit of ­edginess,” he says. “When I first moved here there’d be house parties going off everywhere and six gallery exhibitions every week. Now with the increase in house prices, the demographics have changed. There are a lot more Range Rovers around.” Boisterous development is reshaping the Bondi skyline. The landmark Noah’s Backpackers recently sold for $68 million to pub baron Jon Adgemis, making Terzini’s socialist skin prickle. “Waverley Council maintains an element of low-cost housing, which is good, but if you lose the backpackers, you lose everyone.”

Stasis has long been anathema, but Terzini claims to be slowing down. He’s cut back on drinking, taken up street running again, is spending quality time with his young sons. He thinks that’s what may have happened to his back, actually. “I’ve been throwing my little boy around and, you know, I’m not the young man that I was,” he says.

Rubbish, says McDonald. “He certainly loves his kids a lot but he hasn’t mellowed. He looks wilder than ever, he’s got more tattoos, the earrings are danglier, and his zest for being a punk is as strong as ever. He’s still soaring.”