Gunsler’s Cafe, Pitt Street, Sydney.

Scarce colonial engraving of Gunsler’s Pitt Street cafe, Sydney.

In 1884 Lorenzini was commissioned to provide the decoration of the newly erected Gunsler’s Café in Pitt Street Sydney, near the General Post Office. The restaurant opened in November 1884 and occupied three floors, providing a gentleman’s saloon with a bar and an oyster buffet, a ladies and gentleman’s dining room, a ladies salon, a banqueting hall, and five small salons for private dinner parties and after-theatre suppers. We have only the Sydney Morning Herald’s observation that all of the public rooms had been ‘decorated in a costly style, the ceilings and wall-panels being figured in oils with flowers, and sometimes classic groups’ and the Sydney Mail’s judgement that the schemes for the painted walls and ceilings throughout the building were ‘good examples of chaste and tasteful decoration’. Ref: Sydney Living Museums; Record number: 37216

Contemporary 1884 description; The name of Gunsler is inseperably associated with good eating and drinking. Having devised and superintended the erection and construction of the whole concern, this Vattel of the Southern Hemisphere, the Soyer of Australia, has perfected an establishment where folks can eat as people ought to eat. All that is tempting and appetising, from pate de foie gras to the succulent steak or quail in toast can be got at Gunsler’s well served, and cooked a merveille. The gentlemen’s restaurant is on the ground floor behind the handsome lower bar, while upstairs are the ladies’ rooms. There is ample space at Gunsler’s even for his vast clientele, and the waiting is irreproachable. Mr. Gunsler is an Italian from Trieste, and originally achieved his fame as a traiteur in Melbourne. Everybody knows his reputation as a caterer, and the endless resources of his establishment.

From the original edition of The Australasian Sketcher.