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in March last year has caused prices to

spike, and Messina’s $40,000 annual bill

for vanilla blew out to $100,000.

Working to this scale requires ordering

hazelnuts three months in advance from

Piedmont, for instance, and paying for

it all upfront – an eye-watering cost

when Messina goes through 12 tonnes of

hazelnuts a year. One business partner

found a hazelnut farm outside Melbourne

to buy and everyone got prematurely

excited at its healthy tally of 1,200 trees.

Just one problem: “It was the crappiest

variety of hazelnut,” says Palumbo. So

their colleague single-handedly “relocated

all the existing 1,600 trees and made

them into windbreaks” and planted better

trees – close to 3,000. It’ll be at least three

years before they’re mature enough to

supply just Messina’s hazelnut gelato, but

the company is playing the long game.

In November 2016, the company took

over three dairy farms in Numurkah, near

the border of New South Wales and

Top left and far left:

Gelato Messina’s

Darlinghurst flagship.

behind the scenes.

Victoria, with a view to producing milk

from its own herd of Jersey cows. Instead

of milking the cows twice daily, which

is the norm for many large-scale dairies,

Messina milks its herd just once a day.

And it turns out that makes for better

milk. The owners are getting a premium

for milk with higher fat and protein

content, without having to overtax the

animals. “What the dairy industry has

resorted to producing is white water,”

says Palumbo. “Some cows are not even

producing four per cent fat milk, because

they’re being flogged so hard. Ours are

coming out at 4.8, 5.2.” Last spring, says

Toce, they got it up to six per cent. They

plan to start using milk from the herd in

their gelato later this year.

Messina’s home-grown popularity has

spawned outposts in China and the US.

The Las Vegas store was off the beaten

track – 200 metres away from where the

road stopped and the desert started, in

fact. Some American customers were

taken aback by Messina’s approach of

using actual ingredients (instead of

industrial flavour pastes) in its gelato.

One Yelp review complained the

chocolate flavour was “too chocolatey”

and the pistachio “too pistachio-y”.

Las Vegas has been shuttered and the

focus has turned to Los Angeles, a city

with a thriving food culture. They’ve got

their eye on a sleeper site in Downtown

• a gamble, but one Palumbo has
  confidence in. It could take between
  12 and 48 months to happen, he says.
  “We want it to be a temple to gelato.”
  Back in Australia, people are still
  lining up at the original Darlinghurst
  store, the lines crawling back past the
  Thai restaurant on stifling summer
  nights. Toce lives just around the corner.
  When he and his wife are out walking
  the dog, they see people walking the
  streets with boxes and cones of Messina.
  And every time they do he still gives her
  hand a little squeeze.●

GOURMET TRAVELLER 83

PHOTOGRAPHY CHRIS CHEN (GELATO SCOOPS) & MICHAEL CROSS (PORTRAIT). STYLING LISA FEATHERBY