The creators of Rosé Gelateria level up with a boutique venture that strives for Italian authenticity.
The first thing you wonder with Bronson Tucker and Diana Prinz, owners of Rosé Gelateria, is why their new gelateria isn’t another Rosé Gelateria.
Instead, early in December, the couple opened Luna Gelato in Little Lane, the slick, recently opened New Farm retail and dining precinct on the corner of Merthyr Road and Brunswick Street.
“We started talking to the agent in 2024,” Tucker says. “But it was a long while away, and the landlord there hadn’t quite organised their vision yet, but we knew they definitely wanted gelato.
“We started meeting with them early last year. We have our other brand, Rosé, but they were after something more unique that fit the area there as well.
“We’d always wanted to try other brands and different colour schemes, different branding, and a different concept … this was the opportunity that pushed us towards that.”
Luna does away with much of the supporting menu items peddled at Rosé – the macarons, cookies, and dessert jars – to focus on gelato and a clutch of sorbets. For their part, Tucker and Prinz have leant much more into their trade, travelling to Florence in 2023 to learn traditional gelato-making techniques.
That expertise is reflected in Luna’s fitout, which swaps Rosé’s more conventional gelato cabinet with 22 stainless steel pozzetti (you might have seen them around town at La Macelleria, or Gelato Messina in Ada Lane just off James Street, which has glass pozzetti), which are better at preserving the texture and maintaining the temperature for individual flavours.
“It’s perhaps a bit of a gamble using something like this,” Tucker says. “You can’t see the product like you can in a conventional cabinet … but it just really felt right, with the area being New Farm, having that Italian heritage there.”
The rest of the narrow venue has been given a slick, simple treatment by Gold Coast-based designers Space Cubed, with a curved stainless steel counter complemented by maroon tiling and cabinetry, aggregate concrete floors, and exposed concrete ceilings. The flavours are given visual representation with a cute clipboard set-up on the back wall.
Luna dedicates the majority of its pozzetti to regular flavours such as cookie crumble, white chocolate raspberry, boysenberry, pistachio praline, and vanilla bean. But between two and four pozzetti are given over to seasonal flavours – earl grey and biscuits, strawberry matcha, a take on Cadbury’s Marvellous Creations chocolate called Marvelluna, that kind of thing.
Otherwise, there are gelato shakes, the requisite cone-or-cup decision, a soft-drink cabinet, a small selection of merch that sits in the corner, and that’s about it.
“The experience in the previous spots definitely played a factor in us being confident and going all in with a boutique gelato shop in New Farm,” Tucker says.
“The reception so far has been really good. There’s still a lot to open on this corner, but there’s already plenty of buzz during the day, which has been really nice to become a part of.”
Open Mon-Fri 1pm-10pm, Sat-Sun noon-10pm
2/84 Merthyr Road, New Farm
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Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.
