Coming Soon: The Casa Nostra Team Is Transforming a School Bus Into a 14-Seat Fine Diner

Fine dining on a bus.

If the golden rule is to be able to describe your business idea in five words or less, Da Biuso has passed with flying colours.

This mobile restaurant from Sarah Biuso, her chef husband Biagio Biuso and their son Joseph Biuso will open – if that’s the right term – in January 2023. Where? That’s still to be determined. In what? A repurposed 12.5-metre Iveco school bus.

The Biusos have run various restaurants over the years in Brisbane, Sydney and Cairns. Most recently, they owned Casa Nostra Ristorante on McLachlan Street in Fortitude Valley. It was steering Casa Nostra through the early stages of the pandemic that seeded the idea for Da Biuso.

“We worked quite a lot with degustation menus and partial degustation menus,” Sarah says. “And that’s what a lot of our customers loved. After Covid, we were restricted in terms of numbers but found that everyone was going for those set menus.

“That meant [Biagio] was cooking the food he loved to cook and we began to make those numbers really work for us. We couldn’t find staff anyway, so we kept the numbers low, running it with our family, but then people were having more of a fine-dining experience. We were doing fewer numbers but it was better from a business point of view. We really loved it.”

The 14-seat Da Biuso is taking that focused fine-dining idea to its logical end point, but in a dining room that isn’t anchored to a bricks-and-mortar premises. Sarah says, council approval permitting, the intention is for Da Biuso to pop up at iconic locations such as New Farm Park and Kangaroo Point for one- or two-month stays (no, diners won’t be careening around the suburbs, council bus-style, with aglio e olio flying about the place).

For the fit-out, food-truck outfitter Van Demons Vans (you might recognise the company’s work from vans such as Margarita Margarita and Bill’s Burgers) has been charged with transforming the old Iveco into something resembling a dining tram, in part to capture the spirit of Brisbane’s much-loved streetcars, which last ran in 1969.

“It will have that beautiful old-world feeling, but the interior will have more of a refreshed feel and still be very elegant,” Sarah says.

For food, Biagio and Joseph will be preparing a seasonal contemporary-European menu that has a strong touch of Sicily, where Biagio was born. Expect plenty of fresh seafood and locally sourced protein, as well as pasta dishes. For drinks, Sarah will oversee a wine list that favours Italian drops, backed by a tight selection of cocktails, beers and digestivo.

The Biusos envision Da Biuso doing plenty of duty for functions and group dinners. But its invention as a restaurant says a lot about Brisbane’s post-pandemic appetite for new dining experiences, and pre-Olympics comfort with its role as a tourist destination that celebrates its own places and spaces.

“I think this talks about what people in Brisbane want right now,” Sarah says. “People go to restaurants like crazy. But a lot of people want a new experience, a unique experience. They’re up for something you can’t do elsewhere, and I think Brisbane is particularly forward-thinking in that way.”

Da Biuso is scheduled to open in January 2023 at a yet to be disclosed location.

This article was originally published on October 12, 2022 but was updated on December 2, 2022 to reflect changes to the opening date.