T
here were times when Nick
Palumbo’s gelato shop got so
quiet, he could step into Zushi,
the Japanese restaurant next
door, to deliver coffee to his neighbour
Ray Ang. In 2005, three years after
Gelato Messina’s first shop launched
in Sydney’s Darlinghurst, the gelateria
was still finding its way. The absence of
customers meant Ang sometimes treated
Palumbo like his personal barista. “Nick,
make me a coffee!” he’d yell. In return,
he regularly invited Palumbo over to eat.
Palumbo seldom needed to leave the
table to serve a customer. But Ang got
Messina’s appeal. At the restaurant he
didn’t bother listing any desserts. All the
menu said instead was “go next door”.
And before too long just about everyone
in Sydney did.
Today, Gelato Messina has 16 stores
along the Australian east coast, most of
which attract blockbuster queues well into
the night. It also has the Messina CreativeDepartment, an intimate venue in Sydney
offering seven-course dessert dégustations
by chef Remi Talbot. The gelateria has
more than 180,000 followers on Instagram
and 114,000 Facebook fans, all eager for
news of its latest wild offering – a peanut-
butter number topped with chips called
Mr Potato Head, perhaps, or the Dr Evil
giant mushroom cake. The classics,
tiramisù and pistachio among them, have
their fans, as do the more fanciful likes of
the Game of Cones flavours (the Daenerys
creation included dragonfruit, naturally).
Messina’s beginnings, however, were
rather less colourful. In 1992, Café
Buongiorno, the Adelaide eatery where
Palumbo worked at the time, took receipt
of some dessert-making equipment. It
then sat in the basement for three years.
Palumbo hired a gelato chef to give them
a workout, but it didn’t work out. So he
thought he’d give it a try himself.
“I started really loving it and
hating running the other parts of the ➤It’s the super-successful gelato shop that nearly never
was. LEE TRAN LAM has the inside scoop on how
Gelato Messina became such a phenomenon.
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Strawberries and cream