Customers getting a coffee at Pellegrini’s Espresso Bar will miss Rocco Elice’s familiar moustachioed smiling face when he retires after 50 years as a waiter and manager at the iconic Melbourne restaurant. “I will miss all the customers when I leave,” Elice says. “This was my first job when I started in 1974.
” Rocco Elice is retiring after 50 years of work at Pellegrini’s. Credit: Jason South Elice, 71, walked into Pellegrini’s, on Bourke Street, looking for a job when he arrived from Italy as a 21-year-old. “There were no jobs in Italy,” he says over a granita at the table in the kitchen at the back of the restaurant.
“When I saw my first week of pay – at the time, it was $100 a week – I was so happy. I had never seen so much money in my life.” Elice shared a flat with a Pellegrini’s barista, paying $10 each a week in rent at a time when a coffee at Pellegrini’s was $1.
50 and a bowl of pasta $6. The prices may have changed but Elice says not much else has: “It was very busy then, it still is now.” The restaurant had one of the first espresso machines in Melbourne when it was opened in 1954 by brothers Leo and Vildo Pellegrini.
In 1972, it was sold to Nino Pangrazio and Sisto Malaspina. Sisto was killed in the 2018 Bourke Street stabbings , striking a blow to the institution and the community. “Sisto was like a brother to me,” Elice says.
“He sent me to school on Little Collins Street to learn a bit of English when I first arrived. He.