“I thought, stuff it, bought the ticket, and made the best decision I’ve ever made in my life.”

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Giovanni Pilu Cooks Italy’s Ports on Sydney’s Most Famous Harbour

2 November, 2026

Words by:

Sarah Palmieri

Three decades after a detour into a Sardinian bar changed his life, the chef behind Pilu at Freshwater has opened Flaminia on Circular Quay. Its menu travels through Italy's great port cities, and its owner still stops at every table.

At 3 p.m. on a Friday, when most chefs of his standing would be long gone, Giovanni Pilu was still working the pass at Flaminia. He had been for a run that morning and would run again the next day, and in between he was being summoned, booth by booth, by diners who wanted a handshake, a photo or just to tell him the vongole was very good.

He stopped at every one of them, which is why it took us a solid 10 minutes to cross the room.

Chefs at this level usually take the glory and the awards and leave the rest to everyone else, but Mr. Pilu has never really rolled that way.

Flaminia, which opened in December 2025 inside the Pullman Quay Grand Sydney Harbour, is the biggest move yet for Mr. Pilu and his wife and business partner, Marilyn Annecchini. For two decades their name has been shorthand for long lunches by the beach at Pilu at Freshwater on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, and now that they have set up on the most photographed stretch of water in the country, it certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed. Flaminia is nominated for best new restaurant, and Mr. Pilu for chef of the year.

“When we open, we want best new restaurant,” he said, looking like a man who had checked his inbox more than once. “To be nominated, it’s great. But then if you win, you won.”

As a Melburnian I am contractually obliged to roll my eyes at Circular Quay, and yet I have always been a total sucker for it. I’ll happily do the Sydney tourist trail I would never bother with back home, because this city has a way of opening little doors onto everything that makes it shine, and Flaminia is one of them.

Harbours are where people come and go and where they arrive and make a home, and the great ones, like New York, Naples, Marseille and Hong Kong, have always worked this way. Mr. Pilu, an islander who crossed the world for love, has built an entire restaurant around the idea.

“We are in the most iconic port city in Australia, if not the world,” he said. “Why don’t we cook from the Italian port cities? You’ve got so many of them. It’s not just another Italian restaurant with just burrata and bistecca.”

The menu moves through five ports at a time, which at the moment means Cagliari, Napoli, Venezia, Bari and Palermo, with an antipasto, a pasta, a secondo and a dolce from each. Bari will soon be parked to make way for Pescara, bringing cuttlefish, spaghetti alla chitarra with vongole and pesce in brodetto, and every time a port changes, the menu changes with it completely. “They are all so diverse,” he said. “It’s very exciting for us.”

The room has been redone from floor to ceiling in warm timber and curved banquettes, so it feels a little like the inside of a very well-dressed ship, and meals can begin at the crudo bar, which sent me straight back to the seaside restaurants of Napoli. “I want to do crudo like in Italy, in the south especially,” Mr. Pilu said. “Freshly shucked oysters, fish sliced to order, and all the dressings, lemon, oil, vinegar. No microherbs.”

We had both just come back from Venice, and sitting there I couldn’t help thinking of the gondolas sliding back and forth, of wondering who was on board, and of that feeling of looking out on the world. This might be Sydney’s best answer to a Parisian café terrace, and it suits the place that Mr. Pilu commutes by ferry from his home, a trip of about 20 minutes.


The story of how he got here starts the way plenty of good stories do, with a man walking into a bar.

He was 22, living in Sardinia, and had left the island all of twice. It was the end of summer, he was tired and driving home, and he had no intention of stopping for a drink, but his mate Antonello had other ideas. “I said, ‘Nah, I’m tired,’” Mr. Pilu recalled. “He physically pushed the steering wheel to go to the bar. I said, ‘Man, Antonello, only one more.’”

Inside was Marilyn, a girl from Australia who, though neither of them knew it yet, would one day become his wife, and with her came the start of a journey he could never have imagined. “What even is Australia?” he remembered thinking. “I’m from a small island. I had no clue what this place was.” His dream had always been to learn English, and he had pictured himself one day living in America.

There was a decision to be made. “I had this money to buy a motorbike, or I could spend it on a ticket to Australia,” he said. “I thought, stuff it, bought the ticket, and made the best decision I’ve ever made in my life. By far.”

He landed in 1992, alone and having never left Italy before, and his first memory of the trip is of the plane in Rome with a kangaroo on its tail. When he turned up at Marilyn’s parents’ house, he said, “it was already like their son had rocked up.”

His first boss in Australia, Piero, gave him the lesson he still runs his kitchens by. “He said to me, you may have 10 things that you have to look after,” Mr. Pilu said. “If only nine work and one doesn’t, and you can’t pick out which one it is, it may send you broke.”

He seems to have got all 10 right. In 1997 he opened Cala Luna on The Spit, introducing Sydneysiders to Sardinian cooking, and in 2004 he and Ms. Annecchini opened Pilu at Freshwater in a heritage beach house above the sand, later adding a little kiosk next door called Pilu Baretto. Along the way there was a cookbook as well, the aptly named A Sardinian Cookbook, and Pilu turned 20 last year, which in Sydney restaurant years is roughly a century.

That makes Mr. Pilu part of the city’s old guard, and he is happy enough to wear the title. He spoke fondly of Armando Percuoco of Buon Ricordo, whom he called “the Di Stasio of Sydney.” “Armando is retired. That was the generation for us,” he said. “And now it’s us.”

He remembers when a single review could make a restaurant. “When Good Food used to come out on a Tuesday, people used to pick up the paper and read it every Tuesday. It was like a Bible,” he said. “When we won that award, the restaurant was packed for months and months and months.”


For someone with that kind of track record, he keeps his head a remarkably normal size, and he puts it down to knowing the difference between a good ego and a bad one. “I think there are two types of ego,” he said. The bad kind is all “me, me, me,” and he wants nothing to do with it. “What would I be without my team? I’m only as good as my team.”

He went through the names of his staff like a proud dad at a school concert, from Rob, the head chef, to Davey out front, who is “like my brother,” and Jeremy, “the wine guy.” “I’m not the best cook in the world,” he said. “But maybe I’m one of the best chefs around, because I know I can handle my team, and I’ve created amazing teams.”

The good kind of ego, as he sees it, is really just drive. “When I left Sardinia, I wanted to do something,” he said. “Not just sit there and whinge about the government and everyone else around you.”

“A restaurant is like a dish,” he added. “It’s made with five different ingredients and they all have to work together. If one is not good enough, it’s like not putting in salt. The dish doesn’t work.”

That humility carries through to the dining room as well. “You have to take on feedback,” he said. “Don’t get upset, don’t get offended, don’t take it personally. Then ask, how can we fix it? That’s how we can stay in the game for a long time.”

Running two restaurants at once might sound like a lot, but Mr. Pilu draws a firm line between hard work and working hard. “Working hard I love. It’s never killed anyone,” he said. “Hard work is when you’re pushing uphill. The restaurant is quiet, you’re shuffling staff, maybe you’ve got to close for a day. That’s hard work.”

Whatever energy he has left over goes into running. The day after we met, he was due to run a 10-kilometre leg of the Bondi to Manly for charity, which is no biggie for a man who has done an Ironman.

“Sport, I think it’s good for your sanity, more than your fitness,” he said. “I always say, I eat so I can train. I don’t train so I can eat.” It is exactly what you would hope to hear from a man who owns two Italian restaurants.

A few years ago, a bad fall during a triathlon left him with a fractured pelvis held together by a 35-centimetre titanium pin, a broken collarbone and four broken ribs. “I was a mess,” he said. “I thought I’d never walk again.” From his hospital bed, his son promised him that once he got better they would start racing together, and twelve months later Mr. Pilu crossed the finish line of his first Ironman, in Port Macquarie.

Father and son have raced side by side ever since. “We high-five each other on the run,” he said. “I don’t care how I go, if I win, if I lose, what position I come. For me, it’s the highlight of my life.”

He keeps his priorities in a strict order, with family first, then work, then pleasure. “Don’t start switching them around,” he said. “It doesn’t work.”

It was family, too, that gave the new restaurant its name. Flaminia was the ship that carried Ms. Annecchini’s family from Abruzzo to Sydney in 1959, which makes the arrival of Pescara on the menu feel like something of a homecoming.

“When you’re young, you go, stuff it, I’m gonna give it a crack,” Mr. Pilu said. “It’s a split-second decision. You do it or you don’t.” Had he bought the motorbike, he said, none of it would exist, not the family or the restaurants or the life in Sydney with Sardinia only a plane ride away.

Thirty-three years later, he is still a little amazed by where he ended up. “When I came here in ‘92, never in my life would I have thought I’d be running a restaurant in Circular Quay, the most beautiful harbour in the world,” he said. “You only see the Opera House on postcards or in documentaries. And now we’re here.”

Three decades in, he is clearly still having the time of his life. “The moment I don’t love it anymore,” he said, “I won’t be here.”

As I left, the ferries were pulling in and out of the Quay, carrying people off to wherever they were going next. All those years ago, a tired 22-year-old in Sardinia was talked into one more drink, and Sydney has been eating better ever since.


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