BeanScene Magazine

Growing up in the small country town of Gottolengo in northern Italy, Stefano Manfredi, head of Manfredi at Bells restaurant and Pretty Beach House in Sydney, says that his earliest childhood memories are of the smell of coffee at his father’s favourite hang out spot.

“I remember the coffee shop quite well, I used to go down there when my dad played cards with the other men and occasionally I’d accompany him up to a certain time, and then I’d have to go to bed. I didn’t really want to because there was so much life happening in that café,” Stefano recalls. “That’s what cafés are, they’re places where people meet, do deals, have friendships, have arguments – it’s like the town square.

Like every young child desperate to lick their fingers of all the sticky goodness from a lollypop, chocolate bar or the remnants of a cake mixture, Stefano’s first encounters of coffee are typical of any sugar-loving young boy.

“I probably snuck a little taste of my father’s espresso, the part left at the bottom, you know the sugary bit?” he says. “It’s the best part, it’s left in the bottom of the cup and you get your finger in and scoop it up.”

These days Stefano’s love for sugar in his coffee has faded, but his passion for iconic Italian coffee, the espresso, has grown.

“I actually like the taste of black coffee and if you have a good coffee, it doesn’t really need sugar,” he says.

Stefano is one of Australia’s original ‘master chefs’, before the sensation of culinary profiles went viral on our TV screens. Stefano has made numerous national and international television appearances throughout his career and after more than 20 years at the vanguard of Sydney’s dynamic culinary culture, he’s still educating, learning and sharing his passion for food as an ambassador of modern Italian cuisine. Stefano has opened seven restaurants in Sydney since 1983. Most notably, Restaurant Manfredi (1983-1996) was Stefano’s first award-winning restaurant, honored with three Chef Hats by the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Food Guide. Bel Mondo (1996-2002) also had an award-winning run, acknowledged as the American Express Best Sydney Restaurant, Best NSW Restaurant and the Insegna del Ristorante from the Italian government.

Along with his parents and younger brother, Stefano migrated from Italy to Australia by ship at the age of six. Stefano says coming from the north of Italy to a migrant hostel in New South Wales was quite a shift.

“We adapted to the language fairly quickly, but for my parents it was pretty difficult, they left a whole town of family and acquaintances.”

Although he’s been living on Australian soil for five decades, Stefano still can’t get used to the way Australians drink coffee with so much milk. 

“I’ve never been able to understand the way people have a café latte after a big meal, it’s beyond me,” he says. 

“Milk,” he chuckles, is the one word Stefano uses to sum up the difference between Italian and Australian coffees. Italians, he notes, have a very different relationship to coffee. Most coffee is drunk through espresso, colloquially known as the “national breakfast”. While Stefano says cappuccino and café lattes are “lovely drinks,” they are morning drinks that are not drunk as much as espresso in Italy.

Apart from taste, price difference is also a huge factor in Europe, leading coffee drinkers towards espressos.

“[In Italy] you pay a euro for an espresso standing at the bar. It’s called espresso because it’s a quick drink and away you go, whereas here people sit down to drink their coffee,” he says.
Despite a long history of espresso, Stefano doesn’t believe Italy is stuck on serving traditional coffee. He knows many areas such as Rome, Turin and Napoli that have really great coffee shops and have adapted to different roasting styles and techniques.

As Australia’s specialty coffee scene continues to increase in interest and awareness, Stefano says Italians are open to trying single origins, but he doesn’t believe they are a big deal in Italy, nor are they the essential ingredient to a good coffee.

“A good blend will always be better than a good single origin any day,” he says. “It’s nice to taste an interesting Honduras…but you try and serve that sort of coffee in a modern Australian café, especially when you’ve put milk with it, and a lot of those single origins are quite delicate and will fall apart under the strain of so much milk.

“When it comes down to it, I think the coffee drinker just wants a good cup of coffee with good service; a good espresso poured properly,” he says.

With such a strong background of coffee knowledge, Stefano jumped at the chance to develop a coffee brand that would satisfy his restaurant’s requirements while accommodating to the tastes of Australians and their curious “milk-adding behavior.”

“I looked for balance, complexity and some high notes,” he says. “I wanted that mouth-filling quality and I wanted a long flavour at the end so that when you swallow the coffee, it goes on and it lingers.”

After years of experimenting, Stefano decided on his signature coffee blend, Espresso di Manfredi by Piazza D’Oro. This coffee uses five origins including high quality Arabicas from South America, with five to seven per cent Robusta from Asia to fill out the palate. Stefano describes his coffee as “fine, complex, elegant and acidic, with chocolate sweetness”.

Today, Espresso di Manfredi is well established throughout Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China, Malaysia and Thailand. Last year commemorated the brand’s 10 year anniversary.
Renown as “the Godfather” of Italo-Australian cooking, Stefano remains a passionate advocate for local, sustainable and seasonal produce. Inspired by the rural setting of the Bouddi Peninsula, north of Sydney, Stefano opened Manfredi at Bells restaurant and bar and Pretty Beach House in 2007. Currently, Stefano is working on a new project: establishing Balla, a 160-seat restaurant in The Star, Sydney, set to open in September.

It’s no secret that Stefano is a busy man and long days in the office call for a healthy abundance of coffee. “I’m limiting myself to three coffees a day,” he says. “I’ll have one as soon as I wake up, one mid-morning and another one around 4pm, and that does it for me.” Even at home Stefano can’t escape the aromatic drink with a little Breville sitting on his bench, along with a separate Caffe Bianchi grinder to satisfy the cravings.

Add the titles of food writer and author to Stefano’s already impressive resume, and it’s a wonder how Stefano manages his time. He’s published four books to date and has been writing with various Fairfax publications since 1989. He currently writes a weekly food column for the Sydney Morning Herald’s Spectrum.

“I’ve always liked writing, I majored in English when I was at school, started off a career in primary school teaching and I did English literature at university. But it wasn’t for me, I wanted to work in a restaurant,” he says.

Stefano has another culinary book set in his sights, based around gardening and restaurants, inspired by the beautiful vegetable gardens at Bells at Killcare, which provides most of the restaurant’s fresh produce.

“It’s very timely because as I get older and I get to the end of my career, I can see vegetable gardening looming – I’m thinking ahead,” he says. “In every Italian there’s a vegetable garden in them.”

On the subject of food, when asked how he combines coffee into his cooking, Stefano answers: “It’s very easy to put coffee into cooking, it lends itself primarily to deserts, but you can also use it in the savoury part of the menu,” he says, summing up the holy grail of coffee deserts in one word: Tiramisu. The popular Italian desert, meaning ‘pick me up’ is made of ladyfingers dipped in coffee and layered with a mixture of mascarpone and flavoured with cocoa and liquor. “It’s a classic of course,” Stefano says. “It’s probably the number one coffee desert in the world.”

Stefano is extremely fortunate to combine his passion for food and Italy and according to the man himself, there’s no secret to his success, just hard work.

“Work hard at something that you’re even remotely talented at and you’ll get better and better at it,” he says. “I’m enjoying life, the older I get the more I enjoy what I do.”
“Whenever younger chefs ask me, ‘does it get better’? I say yes, with the benefit of experience and hindsight, it gets better.”

Stefano Manfredi is the author of Fresh From Italy (1993), Bel Mondo: Beautiful World (2000), Seasonal (2007), and Seasonal Italian Favourites (2009).