At Slick New Restaurant Erin, the Gelato Messina Crew Serves Ice-Cream for Dinner

On what was once an unassuming corner in industrial Marrickville, past the clink of scoops and the sound of cheesecake being stirred through dulce de leche ice-cream, big things have been happening at Gelato Messina HQ. It’s not another brilliantly outlandish gelato flavour – though those keep coming – but a new kind of ice-cream experience altogether: Erin.

Messina’s just-launched wine bar and restaurant is a deepening of the brand’s longstanding experiment with flavour, play and surprise. Here, inside what could be mistaken for a slick underground club – complete with DJ-spun house tracks and a terrazzo-topped bar – guests are offered a menu that dares to ask: what if dinner was ice-cream?

Erin’s the offspring of Messina Creative, the degustation experience where every course was accompanied by a frozen element, and its more casual cousin Snackbar, which lived in the same space until late 2024.

“Snackbar confirmed what we suspected: there’s a customer who wants to enjoy the Messina Creative dishes, but in a more relaxed way,” Sian Bishop, Messina’s head of brand and marketing, tells Broadsheet. “We love the idea of someone popping in for a glass of wine, a dish or even just a scoop.” Erin answers that call with its choose-your-own-adventure offering: an eight-course set menu for the committed, or à la carte options for the curious, the indecisive and the tired parent who just needs a Negroni.

And it’s not just any Negroni. Erin’s cocktail list plays like a fever dream in which bar and gelateria collide, crafting the far-from-classic cocktail from parmesan-infused gin and pepperoni-washed Campari. The watermelon Margarita arrives as a frozen scoop, eaten with a spoon rather than sipped. “Joe Bailey runs front-of-house and crafts all our drinks,” says Bishop, adding that the cocktail program sits alongside Moo-Tang, a new natural wine collab with Doom Juice and artist Bella Bruzzese.

Erin’s name is a nod to Erindale, the gelato mecca’s own dairy farm in country Victoria, where the team produces the Jersey milk for the gelato and grows much of the produce that lands on diners’ plates. It’s fitting, then, that the meal opens with offerings from both the farm and the ice-cream shop: pickled veg and a bowl of broken waffle cones dusted in a savoury spice blend reminiscent of Barbecue Shapes.

Like so many flavours in the ice-cream cabinet at the adjacent Messina megastore, Erin’s food – created by Go Amaro (ex-Lumi, Sepia) – dances between comforting and playful. There’s prawn toast topped with tomato-sriracha sorbet, and a pithivier-esque pork and wild mushroom pie joined by ketchup gelato. The Erindale salad – a sculptural mix of zucchini, witlof, pistachio miso and creamy Jersey-cheese gelato – is an edible ode to the farm, while the pillowy gnocchi arrives with a tangle of enoki mushrooms, an umbrella of dehydrated potato starch and a coil of roast-potato gelato. “The real challenge is making the gelato feel integrated into the dish – not just a scoop on the side.”

It’s also where the messiness of boundaries – between dessert and dinner, farm and city, fine dining and fun – is most apparent. Gelato is no longer just a punctuation mark at the end of a meal. At Erin, it’s the kick-off point.

The setting matches the experiment. Vintage furniture softens the bare concrete industrial bones, dark curtains obscure the world outside, and tables spill into the gelato shop. On weekends, the experience goes further as Shadow Baking opens with its pastries and coffee.

There’s something subversive about the whole operation. A wine bar in a gelato shop. Sorbet with your steak tartare. But at Erin, subversion is sweet – sometimes literally – and the rules of dining are rewritten with a wink and a scoop.

Erin
1 Rich Street, Marrickville
0489 951 972

Hours:
Thu & Fri 4pm–9pm
Sat midday–9pm
Sun midday–7pm

gelatomessina.com/erin
@erinatmessina