Andrew Mathieson
FOR traditional Italian barista Michael Quagliara, size really matters.
Neither the number of espresso orders on a busy morning, nor his diminutive frame raises a sweat. But working all day inside four walls that are barely two metres apart should.
Michael stands inside the kitchen, surveys the tight surrounds and shakes his head.
“A smaller area would have been even better,” he explains with a straight face, “it’s too big this way.”
Locals affectionately call the tiny Pakington Street cafe the “hole in the wall”.
There in the name of efficiency, Michael wishes he could make coffee and reach for the milk from the fridge all in the one motion.
“I have to take three steps longer to get to that – very far,” he indicates the difference, hands wide apart.
“I have to do that 200 times a day and bend down at my age.”
After returning from a visit to Italy in 2001 and inspired by its dinky coffee corners down laneways and alleys, Michael made a promise to find the smallest new cafe in Geelong.
The adopted Cats fanatic details the history behind former Geelong captain Barry Stoneham first occupying the hole when he sold kebabs.
“If nobody comes, I didn’t care,” Michael first thought.
“I really wanted a place to retire, do a few coffees and that’s enough. But somehow this place has become quite well-known.”
Michael’s has become a regular haunt for many of the latte-sipping set, wedged in the middle of Pakington Village.
Loyal customers walk up to the side door like an old neighbour.
They are known by name, drinking habits, even the time they need their coffee fix.
“Then you get all these crazy bastards,” Michael points out a smirking customer.
The customer interrupts him and says, “What made you famous and well-known is that you’re a lunatic.”
Michael bites back: “What you don’t know, I am doing this act on purpose.”
The cafe is certainly not about dollars and cents.
He not only serves up hot drinks and Italian treats, but also old-fashioned service where there’s no rush to collect the bill.
Michael casually strolls outside, black apron pulled over his immaculately dressed attire and diligently wipes the blackboard, crooner music bellowing out in the background.
The 64-year-old says nearing Australian retirement age, the cafe may resemble more of an exclusive club.
“When I’m 65 in early January, I’m going to do coffees when I like and to whom I like,” he jokes. “But I think I might do another 10 years yet.”
Paraded over the cafe’s walls, framed photos are divided between his two great loves: Sophia Loren and Geelong Football Club.
He even sought permission from the Italian beauty to name his espresso machine Sophia.
“Because I arrive at seven o’clock, some mornings it’s rather cold,” Michael says.
“So I put my hand on the coffee machine to warm myself up and I said to myself one day, ‘She feels like Sophia Loren’.”
Then he recalls the day of a Sophia look-a-like competition that a four-legged entry won, which outraged a few female contestants.
“The dog won because she looked absolutely fantastic,” Michael smiles, “wearing a good chevon.”
Michael arrived in Australia back in 1970, fresh out of university as a mechanical engineer.
Sponsored to work for two years, he turned his back on heavy drills during the mining boom in outback Western Australia for a better lifestyle in Perth.
Plonked inside the first of the trendy Italian bistros, a young Michael carefully learned how to pour a good cuppa.
“I say it jokingly, but in the Italian clubs in Western Australia, if you didn’t make a good coffee, the bloody Calabrese men would kill you,” he laughs.
“That’s how serious they take their coffee.”
