In the heart of industrial Marrickville, Gelato Messina has unveiled a groundbreaking dining concept that pushes the boundaries of flavor and dining expectations. Erin, the brand’s newly launched wine bar and restaurant, offers a daring twist on the traditional dining experience – where ice-cream is no longer just dessert but the star of the show.
Located within the Messina headquarters, Erin is the latest evolution in the brand’s ongoing experiment with innovation and surprise. The venue, which exudes the energy of a sleek underground club, features a terrazzo-topped bar and DJ-spun house tracks, setting the stage for a dining experience like no other. The restaurant offers guests a chance to reimagine dinner – with ice-cream as the centerpiece.
Erin builds on Messina’s past ventures, including Messina Creative, the tasting menu experience where each course featured a frozen element, and Snackbar, the more casual sister restaurant that occupied the space until late 2024. “Snackbar confirmed what we suspected: there’s a customer who wants to enjoy the Messina Creative dishes, but in a more relaxed way,” says Sian Bishop, Messina’s head of brand and marketing. “We love the idea of someone popping in for a glass of wine, a dish, or even just a scoop.”
The new venue caters to both the adventurous and the indecisive, with an eight-course set menu for those ready to commit and à la carte options for those who prefer a more flexible dining experience. The concept is designed to accommodate everyone, including the tired parent who may just be in the mood for a Negroni.
Speaking of drinks, Erin’s cocktail list is as unconventional as the menu. The drinks, crafted by Joe Bailey, blend the worlds of gelateria and bar. The Negroni, for example, features parmesan-infused gin and pepperoni-washed Campari. The watermelon Margarita is served as a frozen scoop, eaten with a spoon rather than sipped. The cocktail program also includes Moo-Tang, a natural wine collaboration with Doom Juice and artist Bella Bruzzese.
The name “Erin” pays homage to Erindale, Gelato Messina’s dairy farm in rural Victoria, where the brand produces its Jersey milk for gelato and grows much of the produce used in the restaurant. The meal begins with offerings inspired by both the farm and the gelato shop: pickled vegetables and a bowl of broken waffle cones dusted in a savory spice blend that evokes the taste of Barbecue Shapes.
Chef Go Amaro, formerly of Lumi and Sepia, creates a menu that balances comfort with playfulness. Highlights include prawn toast topped with tomato sriracha sorbet, a pork and wild mushroom pie accompanied by ketchup gelato, and the Erindale salad – a creative mix of zucchini, witlof, pistachio miso, and Jersey-cheese gelato. The gnocchi dish features a tangle of enoki mushrooms, dehydrated potato starch, and a swirl of roast-potato gelato. “The real challenge is making the gelato feel integrated into the dish – not just a scoop on the side,” Amaro explains.
Erin’s culinary approach blurs the lines between dinner and dessert, city and farm, and fine dining and fun. At Erin, gelato is no longer reserved for the end of the meal – it’s the starting point for an exciting, unexpected dining journey.
The restaurant’s setting complements the concept, with vintage furniture softening the industrial space, dark curtains creating an intimate atmosphere, and tables spilling into the adjacent gelato shop. On weekends, the experience expands further with Shadow Baking, offering pastries and coffee.
Erin is a subversive take on dining, where a wine bar exists within a gelato shop, sorbet accompanies steak tartare, and traditional dining conventions are turned upside down. At Erin, subversion is sweet – and sometimes even literally so – as the rules of dining are reimagined with a playful wink and a scoop.
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