CAFÉ + BAR DI STASIO

“My mother mortgaged the family home in Thornbury, where I was born, so that I could open my restaurant. It was she who taught me the lessons of sacrifice, generosity, long hours of overtime and love – and that restraint at the right moment is the most important ingredient of all in running a restaurant, and in life…. One of the most poignant moments in my personal journey came when I gave that mortgage back.”

Rinaldo Di Stasio

CAFÉ DI STASIO

Café Di Stasio is an intimate dining room that treads a delicate line between well-mannered elegance and indulgent decadence. A place for coming together, a gallery, a cultural centre, an atmosphere, an institution – a marker.

A very approachable and well laid out volume gives diners an incredible choice when it comes to their wine selection. A long list of the best current, vintage and rose Champagnes lead you into a broad range of Australian boutique wineries and their produce. It is a comprehensive array that includes Rinaldo Di Stasio’s own pinot noir and chardonnay grown on his Yarra Valley estate.

Long-serving white-jacketed waiters lead you through a list of daily specials utilizing the best seasonal produce – Italian truffles, lobster and twice-daily made fresh pasta. These – coupled with an extensive printed menu of house specialities provide choices for all tastes, be it seafood, game or vegetarian options.

More than a meal, Di Stasio is an event – no matter how momentous or intimate, how large or small – to be savoured, enjoyed and reminisced over.

BAR DI STASIO

There is an alchemy to the unique chaos that is a restaurant in the heat of its ‘moment’. That mysterious, spellbinding instant when all the carefully calibrated elements come together effortlessly: kitchen, floor and surrounds. You can create ambience but atmosphere is something all its own. At the height of its service, a restaurant is a theatre of war, a stage for all the human dramas: opera, romance, thriller, suspense, noir, comedy, tragedy, and a high-wire circus act all at once.

Being Italian, if you have a culture you have an identity – your rules become different from everyone else. You don’t have to give a real perspective, just your own perspective.

Rinaldo again made architectural and design waves with the launch of Bar Di Stasio – an adjunct of the exisiting café, but with an ingenuous contemporisation of its offering. Callum Morton, Robert Simeoni, Shaun Gladwell, David Pidgeon and Barry Marshall – Bar Di Stasio weaves together a grand tour collection of contemporary art, which combined with food and drink, become a foundation for a new form of gallery beyond the conventional confines of any of the world’s galleries. Challenging the traditional existence of ‘art’ institutions – modernity against the canvas of a classical trained background – the bar thus becomes a hub for artists; architects; designers; photographers; cognoscenti; dignitaries; business, art, civic leaders; society who’s who… a gathering place for all things afterwards or before.