Gelato Messina

Beginning with a small shop that opened in Victoria Road, Darlinghurst, in 2002, Gelato Messina now plans to take on the glamour of Los Angeles.

The Australian-grown firm did have a shop in Las Vegas but, according to a Facebook post, things didn’t work out in the casino city: “This was our first crack at opening in the US but a few things just didn't pan out as we expected with the Vegas spot ... so we decided it was best to move on to somewhere new for our next shot”.

Look west to LA, where locals should soon get to taste Messina’s creative gelato flavours: coconut and lychee, blood orange, pear and rhubarb, and salted caramel and white chocolate.

With 12 Messina shops in Sydney – counting the shop that opened in Penrith in late July, three in Melbourne, and two in Queensland, Gelato Messina has spread across Australia, tapping directly into the national fervour for Italian ice-cream (perhaps only outdone by the Australian embrace of Italian coffee).

Along with the marketing success, Gelato Messina has had to deal with the occasional whinge – mostly from cranky locals who object to the ice-cream-keen crowds clotting the pavement outside the shops, particularly the outlet in Crown Street, Surry Hills, a stone’s throw from Spencer & Servi headquarters.

“We do get the odd complaint every now and again about the queues blocking the footpath”, says a Gelato Messina spokeswoman. “During busy periods we always have a door host who helps to keep the crowd moving quickly whilst putting a smile on everyone’s face”.

While gelato-famished customers can crowd the pavements outside the stops in Darlinghurst, Surry Hills and Bondi, gelato fans usually don’t have to wait more than a few minutes to pickup their salted coconut and mango salsa cones, or their tubs of Italian nougat or macadamia crunch from the shop in the Star casino building in Pyrmont.

Different regions of Sydney have different gelato tastes. The Messina spokeswoman says patrons of the inner city stores prefer the creative specials (with silly names like Cool-in-Gatta – a combination of mango sorbet, vanilla gelato and macadamia crunch, or Monkey Business – light caramel gelato mixed with banana bread and Nutella whip).  

Shops further west, in Parramatta and Miranda sell more of the traditional flavours – maybe pistachio, or raspberry, or coffee. Green tea gelato is a particular favourite at the shop in the Star, as well as at the outlets in Circular Quay and Parramatta.

Gelato Messina headquarters is in Rosebery, where there’s a shop and the firm’s production facility – where all the gelato is made from scratch, as well as the offices and a classroom, where gelato making and gelato appreciation classes are held. Out the front there’s a gelato ice-cream van, which can be hired for events, and there are smaller carts as well.

This whole, sprawling gelato empire was started by an Australian of Italian blood, Nick Palumbo.

His parents come from Messina, in Sicily, the town just across the Messina strait from Calabria. According to legend, gelato originally came from the snows of Sicily’s Mount Etna, and Sicilians, like nearly all Italians, love their gelato.