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In the eighth decade of his career as a pastry chef, Giorgio Angele of iconic Melbourne brand Brunetti Classico was honoured in the 2024 King’s Birthday Honours list. The 91-year-old shares his story and experiences of early Australian café culture.
When I arrive at Brunetti Classico on Lygon Street at 10.30 on a Tuesday morning, 91-year-old baker Giorgio Angele has already been up for five hours – four of those spent in the kitchen of the iconic Melbourne café in which we meet. Three or four days a week he wakes up at around 5.30am, makes himself a black coffee using his trusty mokapot, and heads to work to craft the same traditional Italian cakes and pastries he’s been making for more than 80 years.
His shift should be almost over when I arrive, but I’m tearing him away from preparing almond biscotti and, when I leave an hour later, he retreats to his work bench to start on a batch of nougat. A few months ago, Giorgio was awarded a Medal of the Order for services to the hospitality industry in the King’s Birthday Honours List 2024, yet this recognition has only inspired him to continue doing what he loves and pass on his expertise to the next generation of bakers.
“The Medal of the Order was a big surprise, I didn’t know anything about it until I received it,” says Giorgio.
“We will celebrate when I go to the ceremony as it will also be grandson’s birthday. I still feel good and strong, so I have no plans to retire any time soon. If I stopped, I don’t know what I would do, this is my hobby.”
To many, being the patriarch of family business that has grown to become one of Melbourne’s most loved hospitality institutions is much more than a hobby, but for the nonagenarian, his daily duties in the kitchen haven’t changed a great deal from when he started his career in the 1940s.
Honing his craft
Born in Rome, Italy, Giorgio began working at just 10 years old. After spending the mornings at school, he would head to his uncle’s bar in the afternoons, where he would serve aperitivo and coffee to locals and tourists.
“My cousin was one of the best pastry chefs in Rome. At first, I just served at the bar, but later I learned how to make croissant, cornetti, and other traditional pastries. We didn’t just prepare them for our own bar, we also supplied hotels such as Hotel Santa Chiara [located a cent’s toss from the Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon],” he says.
Giorgio fell in love with baking and, as soon as he could, gave up school to pursue his dream of becoming a pastry chef. He
and his cousin went on to bake for some of the most iconic cafés in Rome, working in the beating heart of the city’s traditional coffee culture.
“Coffee was ingrained in Roman life. We were near lots of offices, so people would come in early to get coffee,” he says.
“There was one café, Sant’Eustachio, where the coffee was so famous they covered up the espresso machine so you couldn’t see how they prepared it. The coffee was like cream.”
Image: Brunetti Classico
After honing his craft for several years, in 1956 Giorgio applied to be a pastry chef for the Italian Olympic team who were heading to Melbourne for the summer games. His application was successful and, despite never leaving Italy before, the 23-year-old embarked on the 29-day voyage to Australia.
While the athletes enjoyed the luxury of air travel, Giorgio and other chefs from across Europe sailed over with the ingredients to ensure their athletes had all the home comforts they could desire.
“It was 1956, so sourcing spaghetti, parmigiano, and other traditional Italian ingredients in Australia wasn’t easy,” he says.
Part of a team of five Italian chefs (one head, two classic, and two pastry), each morning Giorgio would bake fresh pastries for the athletes, as well as sweet treats and cakes to power them through the games.
“The head chef was very good and would let me sneak out to go and watch the football,” he says.
After spending three weeks in the Olympic village and then cooking for guests at Mario’s Restaurant, a popular venue among Melbourne’s Italian community at
the time, Giorgio travelled to Sydney to take the boat back to Italy. As he sat down to lunch at an Italian restaurant with friends before leaving, he was asked to stay for three more months to run a cake shop in the city.
Three months turned into a year, and then Giorgio got a call about a small cake shop in Melbourne’s Kew suburb that needed a new owner and pastry chef.
“It was a tiny shop in an area with few Italians. I didn’t want to, but at first I had to bake things Australians wanted to eat, such as pies, coconut macaroons, and apple slices,” he says.
“It was very quiet, so I ended up cooking for the other shop owners nearby; I’d cook pasta and spend lunch with the local pharmacist, butcher, and greengrocer.”
To go back to making the kind of cakes he loved, Giorgio knew he had to get his creations under the noses of Melbourne’s Italian community. After watching the bus drivers pass his window each day, he came up with the idea of catching the empty busses back to Carlton and delivering his classic masterpieces to the Italian businesses in the area.
“I caught the bus to Lygon Street every evening with boxes and boxes of cakes. I did this for three or four months until a friend of mine bought a car and he started doing deliveries for me,” he says.
A new kind of coffee culture
With many of the Italians who emigrated to Australia in the early 20th century settling in Carlton, Lygon Street was the heart of Italian coffee culture in Melbourne. Giorgio recalls the cafés and bars being a busy hub of Italian chatter in the afternoons, with people gathering to socialise and drink coffee after work.
“For many of the Italians who didn’t speak much English, this was one of the few places they could come to socialise. There were other venues in the city, but Lygon Street was the central place where people would come to drink coffee and chat,” he says.
“Australians started to embrace this coffee culture too, but it was a slow process because they already had their tradition of drinking tea. As the Australians and Italians started to mix more, the locals embraced my cakes and the tradition of espresso.”
As Giorgio’s cake shop became more popular over the years, he also expanded his operation. He started to sell coffee beans alongside his cakes, choosing to work with Vittoria Coffee, a family-owned business roasting Italian-style coffee in Australia since 1958. He also launched a successful biscuit business.
Not one to rest on his laurels, in the 1960s Giorgio introduced the panettone to the people of Melbourne, a career highlight he is particularly proud of.
“In the 1960s, very few people outside of the Italian community had heard of panettone. It’s a special process using naturalised yeast. I started making them on a small scale, then as they grew in popularity we had to expand,” he says.
Today, for many Melburnians, the Christmas panettone is synonymous with the Brunetti brand. Giorgio says in the early days, his shop at the time was close to the Channel Nine studios, resulting in a stream of celebrities popping in for their holiday panettone.
Image: Brunetti Classico.
The Brunetti era
Despite Brunetti Classico being one of Melbourne’s most well-known hospitality brands today, it was more than 30 years into Giorgio’s career in Australia that he, and his sons, took on the Brunetti operation.
It was first established in 1985 as an authentic pasticceria in Carlton, and in 1991 Giorgio and his family took on the business from the original owners who were moving back to Italy.
“At the time it was just a small shop on Faraday Street; we kept the name because it had built a good reputation,” he says.
Over the past 30 years, Brunetti Classico has gone from strength to strength, opening a spacious venue in the heart of Carlton within Lygon Court as well as five other venues in the city, including two in Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport. Creating thousands of cakes each week, it’s hard to believe the kitchen is still located within the Lygon Street venue. Giorgio is now joined by more than 30 chefs, yet he still uses traditional Italian recipes that were passed down to him from his family.
The success of the business, he says, is down to ensuring the quality remains high.
“We have built our reputation on the quality of my cakes,” he says.
“We still import many of our ingredients from Italy, and quality will always be part of our philosophy. It means people continue to keep coming back.”
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This article appears in the August/September 2024 edition of BeanScene. Subscribe HERE.
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