The former owner of the Piccolo Bar will be remembered for his anything-goes attitude and unconditional hospitality.
It’s the ever-present tea towel twirled around one arm that most people will remember. And the constant knitting. The bite in his words and sweetness of his smile.
Sydney cafe society lost a little bit of its heart and a lot of its soul this week, as Vittorio Bianchi, remembered as the owner of the Piccolo Bar in Kings Cross, died at the age of 91.
He was already down to just one coffee a day following a triple bypass in his 80th year, a reluctant downgrade from his usual five or six espressos.
Piccolo Bar sits in a crooked little street running down the hill off Darlinghurst Road in the Cross, and it is indeed piccolo. Opened in 1952, it was a magnet for those who needed coffee, needed Kings Cross, and needed a familiar face.
This was long before your milky, weak, soy chai latte days. This was the birth of the espresso era: strong, black and bittersweet. Even more bitter at the Piccolo Bar, from memory, due to a heart-stoppingly dark roast.
With the nearby Sebel Townhouse in Elizabeth Bay Road being the accommodation of choice for touring bands and visiting celebrities, the Piccolo crowd could include Jeff Buckley, Mel Gibson, Marianne Faithfull, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Local artists such as Brett Whitely and future prime minsters including Gough Whitlam pulled up a chair.
In the ABC TV show Rake, the irrepressible, hungover, brilliant criminal barrister Cleaver Greene, played by Richard Roxburgh, was forever falling out of bed in his tiny flat upstairs and heading downstairs to the Piccolo Bar for something to revive him before a court appearance.
Born in a village outside Naples in 1934, Bianchi arrived in Sydney by ship in the 1950s. His father had been blinded in World War II, and his mother had died of cancer, so Australia – and Sydney, and Kings Cross in particular – would have appeared as a beacon of hope, a new life. He worked at Piccolo Bar from the 1960s, buying it outright in 1994, and turning it into his own personal lounge room.
In those years that he ran it for 24 hours a day, it was an open door for actors, strippers, drag queens, everyone. People who needed coffee, and people who needed people.
“To live in the Cross meant that you knew Vittorio Bianchi,” says journalist and former Kings Cross resident Barry Divola. “It was impossible not to know him … his infectious laughter and cutting asides will linger on as long as that building is standing. He’s as much a part of that place as the walls and ceiling.”
Divola used to write a monthly column, Street Life, for the Herald’s the(sydney)magazine.
“I would sit down with a Sydney character and ask them about their lives. I always wanted to write a Street Life about Vito. He pretended he didn’t want to be interviewed. But, of course, he did. So one wet Tuesday in 2009 I wandered in, and he made me a (pretty average) coffee, sat down, let out a dramatic sigh and said, ‘Alright, what do you want to know?’.
“Unsurprisingly, he had a lot to say, about being an Italian immigrant and coming to Australia at the age of 14 knowing no English, about the good and bad old days of the Cross, about being a gay man at that time, about his hatred of gentrification and what it was doing to inner-city Sydney, about his adoration for the theatre and his admiration for actors and performers.
“In many ways, Vito was a performer himself. The Piccolo was his stage, and he was the star.”
Piccolo Bar was not the best cafe in town, but it was pure magic, like entering a portal to a cafe era that had long gone. Bohemian, frisky, cheeky, kind, funny. Run without rules, run for Vito’s friends – and everyone was Vito’s friend.
David and Amy Spanton now run the Piccolo Bar as an aperitivo bar and diner. They do it with respect for the past, but also with a little of that no-rules-are-good-rules inspiration that is Bianchi’s real legacy. “If you have a chance to pop by this week, come and check out some of the photos, and raise a glass to Vittorio and his life,” says David Spanton. “He truly is part of the fabric of The Cross, and his memory will live on.”
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Jill Dupleix is a Good Food contributor and reviewer who writes the Know-How column.
