1

Gelato Messina chef and

co-owner Donato Toce

(left), and founder and

co-owner Nick Palumbo.

Choc mint

business,” he says. “All I wanted to do

was make gelato.”

Adelaide didn’t seem big enough for

the specialist gelateria he was building in

his mind, so he made the move to Sydney

in 1999, and, after giving the location

some serious thought, he opened Gelato

Messina on Darlinghurst’s Victoria Street.

The year was 2002 and the signature

flavour was lychee and coconut.

Donato Toce, a chef who had worked

at A Tavola, the Italian restaurant across

the road from the original Darlinghurst

store, joined the team in 2008. It was

around then that things started to take on

a momentum of their own. “The very first

flavour that spawned all this was peanut

butter and gingerbread,” Toce says. And

it was something he and Danny Palumbo,

Nick’s brother, who joined the business in

2006, created almost by accident. “It was

just hot gingerbread out of the oven and

peanut-butter gelato. That’s all it was.”

Then the pavlova flavour Toce came

up with – vanilla gelato with raspberry,

passionfruit purée and baked meringue

• sent things into overdrive.
  Toce credits two things for ramping
  up people’s interest: Messina making its
  gelato-churning visible to the public to
  emphasise how house-made everything
  was; and Danny’s idea of reciting specials,
  like at a restaurant. Pavlova was one of
  those specials. There was a rule that if
  something was just churned, “You had to
  stick five spoons into the cup and go up
  to customers and say, ‘guys, just try this’.”
  Eventually, reciting seven specials in
  a row got unwieldy and the specials board
  went up. Names such as “Elvis the Fat
  Years” got people’s attention.
  And then along came social media.
  “I was posting on Facebook before you
  could put a picture on it,” says Toce.
  And once images were enabled, he
  uploaded a picture of the mushroom
  cake. It got 250 likes. “We thought it
  went viral – 250 likes!” he says. “A bad
  post for us now on Instagram is 3,500.”

A

fter this things got “blurry”.

Toce remembers this, though:

“Nick said, ‘Can you do the

till? Just send me what we did’.

I sent him through the number and he

said, ‘Count it again, you’re wrong’.”

“Seven grand in a day for a gelato

bar in 2009 – that’s a shitload of money.

I used to turn over $7,000 a week, years

before,” says Nick Palumbo. Messina

was selling close to 2,000 serves a day

at $3.90 a scoop.

The lines started to snake past the

Thai restaurant three doors down, and

the owners complained that Messina

fans were blocking their entrance. They

requested the queue run the other way.

But then another venue, The Victoria

Room, started protesting.

In the early days, Messina produced

1,000 litres of ice-cream a week. Now it’s

about 25,000 litres across the 16 stores.

The recipes remain the same and

Messina still has the spirit of a family

business, with the owners’ offspring

working the lower ranks of the stores.

Key staff still have gelato for breakfast,

for quality control.

Messina’s challenges, however, are

on a different scale. A cyclone that

Strawberry ravaged Madagascar’s vanilla crops

Strawberries and cream

Pavlova

Vanilla

Mango