Pioneering restaurateur who shaped Sydney’s Italian dining scene dies at 93

Doreen Orsatti, who shaped Italian dining in Sydney at Chianti Restaurant in Surry Hills and its 1990s successor Gastronomia Chianti, has died. She was 93.

Born Doreen Phillips, she had an early taste of exotica in a suburban 1930s Australia still mostly wed to grey meat. “Her mother used to use garlic and olive oil,” Doreen’s daughter, Daniela Catalano, said.

The young Doreen wasn’t born into an Italian household, but she cultivated a fine-tuned nose for the cuisine and the eye of a restaurateur.

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“When we were young and overseas on holidays, it was Mum, not Dad, taking notes, things we could do at the restaurant,” Catalano said.

Chianti Restaurant, which Doreen would later steer, was a significant patch on the Sydney restaurant quilt. The restaurant opened in 1955, a year before Beppi’s, the East Sydney restaurant with which it once ran a tongue-in-cheek feud for the title of Sydney’s oldest Italian restaurant.

Doreen’s future husband, Franceso “Frank” Orsatti, arrived in post-war Sydney after serving as a radio operator on an Italian submarine and a stint as a teacher. When a group of priests were struggling with a food venture feeding migrants at 444 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills, Orsatti and an early business partner stepped in and took over the venue.

Fast-forward a couple of years and Frank met customer Doreen at table five. “We always called it the love table,” Catalano said.

There was only one place open in early 1960s Sydney for a Sunday night drink without a meal, so the couple’s early days of courting included The International. Yes, Sydney International Airport.

Doreen Orsatti was soon drawn into the business, driving the restaurant’s shift to a more adventurous product. Catalano said the introduction of calamari and squid to the menu was an unexpected shift for conservative mid-century Sydney. Doreen oversaw the floor as the restaurant segued from diners such as actor Peter Finch and politician Doc Evatt to Crocodile Dundee star Paul Hogan and longtime regular, then-NSW premier Neville Wran.

Orsatti saw it all. “There was one customer who didn’t know what spaghetti was, so she pulled out her nail scissors and started cutting it,” Catalano said of the daily trials her mother endured. There was another who ate his bill, and the advertising agency executives so trusted they’d be left to close the door when they were finished drinking. Until they didn’t, upon which they received a famous Orsatti serve down the phone.

She was known for her quick wit. When a 25-year regular complained and said the food was terrible, she told him he was an idiot because he continued to eat it. When veteran journalist David Dale wrote his Walkley Award-winning story in 1983 on Italian waiters, it touched on the feisty dining room banter in the 1970s between Orsatti and Armando Percuoco, who would eventually go on to open Buon Ricordo in Paddington.

“It was just theatre,” the veteran Italian restaurateur said this week. “We were great friends.”

Indeed, after Frank died in 1983, Orsatti ran the restaurant solo until the early 1990s, when she and Percuoco teamed up to open Gastronomia Chianti in its place.

In an article dedicated to iconic Sydney restaurants, prominent journalist and critic Leo Schofield wrote in the Herald in 1988: “I [can’t] think of a hostess in town who for three decades has made it her life’s work to pamper her clients. One never feels like a mere customer here. More like a guest.”

Orsatti retired in 2000, but maintained her love of food. Catalano said her mother was planning an itinerary of Sydney restaurant visits shortly before she died on July 31.

In the days before his own death last week aged 77, Dale reached out to his old colleagues at the Herald to alert them to Orsatti’s passing.

Percuoco, who was friends with both Orsatti and Dale, lamented the loss of two figures who helped shape Sydney food.

Dale might have been a former foreign correspondent, and one-time editor of The Bulletin, but he always had fine food running through his organs, and co-edited The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide and wrote cookbooks.

Percuoco admired Dale’s intellect and tenacity to get in the kitchen and watch how it’s done. “In the end I think he knew more than us,” Percuoco said.

As for those famed clashes with Orsatti at Chianti, Percuoco said: “We had arguments all the time.”

It was usually about their different philosophies on how the restaurant should be run, he said. “I wanted the restaurant one way, she wanted it the other,” Percuoco said.

Never one to back down when it came to her role in shaping Sydney dining, Orsatti did it her way.