Get a look at Latteria, the new cocktail and aperitivo bar from Luca Baioni

Step Into The Never Never 2024 is here and you’d better hold onto your butts, the prize is better than ever.

You’ll need to create two drinks: a Gin & Tonic serve that embraces our great beaches and coastlines — surely, some of the world’s best — to ‘Toast the Coast’; and a flavour-first cocktail using only three ingredients, that makes the hairs stand up on the back of co-founder Sean Baxter’s head (his words, not mine).

This year’s winners will score a McLaren Vale trip like no other: luxury accommodation, helicopter rides, and dining in South Australia’s most celebrated restaurants.

You’ll want to hurry — drinks need to be on menus at the start of May. Email sean@neverneverdistilling.com.au to enter ASAP.

Luca Baioni has an impressive bartending CV: he’s worked behind the stick at Jerry Thomas Speakeasy in Rome, and the all time great Melbourne bar, Black Pearl. But he’s perhaps best known around Australia for his time as a brand ambassador for Campari.

Well, Luca has now stepped into the next stage of the bartender lifecycle, and opened his own bar: Latteria. Luca has opened the venue along with fellow expat Italian, Nicola Pau, and chefs Rhys Nicolson and Max O’Callaghan, under the guidance of prolific Adelaide restaurateur Simon Kardachi (the award-winning Maybe Mae is one of his, too).

The Adelaide bar, which opened earlier this month on Hutt Street, is inspired by Luca and Nicola’s experiences growing up in the north of Italy, as Luca says in the interview below.

The latteria was much like the Australian take on the milk bar, but it also served as a meeting place, where you’d meet your friends to connect and then head out for the night. This Adelaide re-interpretation of the latteria will focus on cocktails, plenty of wine by the glass, and good food, all served with — as Luca says — a dash of ‘Italianity’.

I had the chance to try some of the drinks in late February, when Luca and Nicola brought some of the team to Sydney for one of PS40’s takeover Tuesdays. The Rhubarb Sbagliato (dark rhubarb, native currants and cranberry Beaujolais, Campari — $22) is a fizzy, refreshing sipper well worth your time; so too is their Breakfast in Milano, which from my memory is a cappucino milk-washed number made with apricot croissants — apparently it’s a Milanese thing — and super tasty. But one of the highlights — which is on the menu now, too — was the non-alc Adonis riff. If more non-alc drinks tasted like that, I might drive to bars more often.

You can follow Latteria on Instagram at @latteriabar and online at latteriabar.com.au and in real life at 185 Hutt Street, Adelaide.

Sam Bygrave: What’s the elevator pitch for this place?

Luca Baioni: Well, the inspiration behind Latteria is kind of rooted in old school Milanese laterrias, [they] were sort of the Italian interpretation of milk bars. Milk bars are something that you have all around the world. You’ve got them in Australia, you’ve got them in America, you’ve got them in India, Germany.

The only thing is that Italians, they really love to drink and to eat. So after after starting to sell milk and bread, they say, Oh, why don’t I serve them by some wine or like a plate of pasta? And, and the thing evolved from there.

This was a very strong thing from the 50s to the 90s, like me calling myself, we grew up going to latterias.

Now they’re not really there anymore. You’ve got like a couple. But the cool thing about them is that they were an extremely important point of reference for the community. You would go there as a meeting place where you go, oh, let’s meet there and then we see what we do. And the concept for us was, okay, what if those latteria, they never closed and what would they look like if they were relocated in Adelaide, in our time, day and age?

And because it’s us behind it, what Latteria in Adelaide is gonna be is a cocktail bar with a strong food focus, a sprinkle of Italianity because you can take the boys out of Italy, can’t take Italy out of the boys.

That would be impossible.

Yeah. And [Latteria will have] just a very, very strong focus on community and hospitality, which is probably what we do best, even more than drinks and food, to be honest.

So to foster that sense of community, what are the sorts of things you’ll do?

Well, already, I think we’re tackling it in different ways. The space itself is designed to be very fluid and flexible and to cater for different styles of service. So you can come in during the day and have a quick lunch, you can come in in the afternoon and have a glass of wine or a coffee, standing up at the bar, have a little aperitivo late in the afternoon, you can come for a tasting menu at dinner if you want and you can stay for a cocktail, just super relaxed in a moody environment with a live DJ playing late in the night.

[We’re] very much catering for the different parts of the community in different times of the day. So that’s one side of it. The other side is also having an offering that is catering for different pockets, for example, I love to go out and dine in beautiful restaurants and also go to amazing cocktail bars and leave 30 bucks for a for a beautiful Martini — but at the moment I’m broke if I have to be honest, so I also need my refreshment at like 10 to 15 bucks!

So that’s also something that we have in mind. If you think about our wine list, you can go from a $14 glass to a $50, everything is by the glass — you can have a glass of Dom Perignon for $150 if you feel splurgy. But we want to cater for different parts of the community.

One thing that we will focus on a lot — probably because of my background — is a training program for our people to get Latteria’s bartenders and our team to be as confident as they can and grow as a team. We will focus on an internal training program. However, if we’re doing a category training, our idea is being able to invite the industry to that training, whether it’s me doing it or whether it’s a brand ambassador or a guest or whatnot. We do want to try to establish Latteria as a point of getting together for the industry and for the trade.

If you’re in with bartenders and hospitality, they’ll recommend you to other people, to other customers, that sort of thing?

Absolutely. Our industry is beautiful and is very much rooted in bartender culture and bartenders’ appreciation for service and a good time, you know?

In terms of the drinks you’re going to be offering when you’re open at the bar, cocktail wise, what’s the brief?

We will have lots of classics available, especially classics that are relevant for the concept.

I’m designing the first rendition of the menu and through our cocktail training, our training program, I want to have the whole team be able to work together to then take the menu that is very much dictated from my experience and elevate it and drive it in the future. My dream is that in three years time, two years time. I don’t even have to make a menu. I want the team to work for us and drive really what Latteria should be in the future.

We will start very much with lots of variations on classic cocktails, or reinterpretations of that, and then starting from there, there will be a focus on the produce of the land.

South Australia is blessed with some of the best produce around. So why not use them in our cocktails? And you have a sprinkle of Italianity in our drinks as well.

But it doesn’t want to take itself too seriously. You know, it wants to be playful.

In terms of the playfulness of the menu, why is it important for you guys to go down that road rather than a more sort of serious menu?

I think it ties very much into the concept of Latteria.

I think high quality can be fun and we believe that through genuine hospitality — and a guest-focused hospitality — you can serve even a glass of water and have everyone have the best time ever. That is really the success of hospitality. But then if you can do it with a drink or two it’s fucking even better.

Step Into The Never Never 2024 is here and you’d better hold onto your butts, the prize is better than ever.

You’ll need to create two drinks: a Gin & Tonic serve that embraces our great beaches and coastlines - surely, some of the world’s best — to ‘Toast the Coast’; and a flavour-first cocktail using only three ingredients, that makes the hairs stand up on the back of co-founder Sean Baxter’s head (his words, not mine).

This year’s winners will score a McLaren Vale trip like no other: luxury accommodation, helicopter rides, and dining in South Australia’s most celebrated restaurants.

You’ll want to hurry — drinks need to be on menus at the start of May. Email sean@neverneverdistilling.com.au to enter ASAP.