with John Picpus
Latte Dah: Where Calabria meets comfort
Tucked quietly away from Foster’s busy main street, a small takeaway kitchen is serving some of the most soulful Italian food in South Gippsland, and doing it almost unnoticed.
Latte Dah, run by local mother-daughter team Nancy and Rosa, doesn’t have footpath tables, hanging plants or polished concrete floors. What it does have is a nonna who has been cooking for more than 60 years, and food that tastes like it’s been made for people who matter.
Rosa arrived in Australia from Calabria in the late 1960s, part of a quiet wave of Italian migrants who came to Gippsland chasing hard work and a better life. Her future husband’s family had arrived even earlier, dairy farming near Foster long before Italian food was fashionable in country towns.
“I never went to school,” Rosa says simply. “But I know everything by heart.”
She learned to cook at 11 years old, cooking alongside her grandmother, mother and later from her Sicilian mother-in-law. Those same recipes, never written down, never measured, never compromised, now form the heart of Latte Dah’s kitchen.
Nancy, her daughter, has spent a lifetime in food, from owning earlier takeaway shops in the main street to running successful cafés across the region. After the loss of her husband, she was offered the chance to run a café in Toora, a decision that changed everything.
“That’s where Mum’s food really took off,” Nancy says. “That’s when people started coming for the cooking.”
When that lease ended, they moved to their current location, smaller, quieter, harder to see, but the food and the people followed them.
Every day, Rosa makes lasagne and potato bake from scratch. The meat sauce simmers for six hours, made from imported Italian passata. No onion. No garlic. Just meat and tomatoes, cooked slowly the way her mother taught her.
Her coffee, too, has built a reputation. Offered blends from visiting roasters, she always returns to the one she believes tastes like home.
“I think ours is quite special,” she says. “It’s Italian. It has that little flair.”
“Our prices are extremely competitive, I want them to be able to afford good food,” Nancy says. “That way, they can come back maybe two, even three times a week.” The Picpus’s have devoured three servings of Rosa’s lasagne: at $10 a serving how could you not?
Then there’s the arancini balls - absolutely devine. And then the rather special sausage roll - a cut above the rest even if it does have that very Aussie of ingredients, the shredded carrot.
Nancy is now close to beginning her next chapter: a purpose-built container café on land she owns, still in Foster but with space to sit down, breathe and build something that matches the quality of what’s already coming out of the kitchen. I, for one, cannot wait.
