Appetising Acts at Lucios
Often in life the path forward is marred by obstacles and challenges. John Caruso learns that following your heart can sometimes end with a standing ovation.
We sit on the deck at Lucio’s Marina, the Noosa River sparkling in the morning glow of a stunning winter’s day. There’s sunshine, lots of sunshine and the odd outboard motor putting about making itself known. The table with its crisp white linen is set with glasses of water, espressos, and my digital recorder, ready to capture another episode of our podcast, Everyone Has a Story, while Matteo’s staff quietly and meticulously prep the restaurant for another day of trade.
Matteo Galletto’s vision for Lucio’s Marina is best described as a performance: a play, a production, a work in progress broken into three acts. Act one, the opening! Act two, the now; and act three, the future.
“We’ve made huge leaps and bounds since we first opened and that’s the message we’re pushing now,” Matteo says. “We opened as best we could post-COVID with staffing levels not where we wanted them to be, so the first twelve months was about building a team to build the restaurant.
“People came and they had incredible experiences, but it was never the restaurant I wanted to open. In our second year and at the end of this year, we’ll be into year three and we’ve turned the restaurant into what I envisaged when I started this journey.
“We’ve matured. We’re still seafood focused, but the menu has broadened incredibly. Our group menus, our snack offerings, we’ve spent a lot of time listening to what people want.
“I don’t like the term ‘market testing’, but we look at dishes, what people like and what they don’t, focusing on customer satisfaction while still offering something unique that makes us different from the rest.
“Creating memorable experiences, not just around good food or good service or the setting, but creating a cohesive experience that’s irreplaceable.”
Illustrating Matteo’s points, I recall several experiences at Lucio’s Marina that highlight the level of service and attention to details. There’s an Italian saying that Matteo’s father, Lucio, would often say to him “studia perché la terra è bassa”. The direct translation is “study why the earth is low”, however, the literal translation doesn’t quite capture the essence of the phrase. A more idiomatic translation would be “study hard, because the world is tough/life is hard”.
It’s a phrase that Matteo still remembers because it accompanied his father’s desires for his son to do something other than hospitality.
“I tried to get into so many things, I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Matteo says. “I went to university and studied commerce, I did an arts commerce degree at UNSW however when it came to specialising in something, I had no direction.
“At the same time, I was working a lot at dad’s restaurant, Lucio’s, in Sydney and that job always seemed to me to be the only legitimate job. A real job.”
Lucio’s Marina Noosaville wasn’t his first solo project.
“I opened a small restaurant in Leichhardt in 2015,” Matteo says. “I’d been working with dad for ten years and we were butting heads, it’s inevitable in a family business so I opened my own restaurant called Capriccio.
“It still exists, and that gave me the freedom to try ideas and do things I couldn’t do working for dad at Lucio’s.
“It was a blank slate and that was a lot of fun and that opportunity was formative. I could never have opened this place here in Noosa without that experience.”
What about the third act? The future?
“It’s about constant iterations and improvements,” Matteo says. “ I’m very happy with the team, the dining room, the bar, and the offerings.
“My philosophy with the menu is that we don’t change a dish until we find something better to replace it. The process is we’ll ‘special’ them then look at the menu however if I feel we’re not there yet, then we’ll wait.
“Same with the wines. There are over 200 wines on the wine list, and there are some obvious gaps, however I don’t want to put things on the list for the sake of having them on there.
“I’d rather wait until I find something that I’d love to drink or that I think offers great value or is surprising or different.”
The journey is far from over. The ensuing production features growth, refinement, and unwavering dedication. Each new day is an opportunity to rewrite the script and create an encore that leaves an enduring mark.
You can listen to the full chat with Matteo on the Everyone Has a Story: Conversations from the Sunshine Coast and Noosa podcast. We discuss three generations of Gallettos working in hospitality all the way back to Liguria, Italy and we talk the 1970s when Matteo’s mum convinced his dad to bring his knowledge and experience of Italian cuisine to Sydney. It’s worth a listen.
