Applejack Opens Gonzo, Its First Italian Venue, in Sydney's CBD

Applejack Hospitality has opened Gonzo inside The Grace Hotel on York Street in Sydney's CBD, marking the multi-venue group's first move into Italian dining. The venue opened today, serving lunch and dinner Monday to Saturday from 12pm until midnight, with Sunday lunch service set to begin shortly.

For a group that has built its name across Sydney's hospitality scene without touching Italy's cookbook, the opening represents a deliberate category leap. And the founders know it.

"We've never done Italian before, and we didn't want to do it the expected way," said Applejack co-founder Hamish Watts. "Gonzo is the most playful venue we've built: a room full of energy, food that keeps coming, and a team whose job is to make sure every table leaves with a story."

Who is running the kitchen?

The culinary program sits with Director of Culinary Patrick Friesen, working alongside Applejack Executive Head Chef Matías Cillóniz and Gonzo Head Chef Aldo Farroni. Each brings a personal interpretation of Italian cuisine to the menu, rather than a single unified regional identity — an approach that shows in the launch lineup's range.

Opening dishes include:

• Bucatini amatriciana
• Shiraz-braised short rib
• Caesar pizza with spring garlic, mozzarella and anchovy
• Rigatoni with pork rib, fennel sausage and meatballs

The Caesar pizza is a signal of the venue's direction: a Roman-adjacent format filtered through an Anglo dining staple, repackaged for a Sydney audience. That's menu engineering, not nostalgia.

Cillóniz framed the concept in one line: "Gonzo is plentiful, a little quirky, and Italian of sorts. An Italian for Sydney."

The phrase "Italian of sorts" is doing real work here. It distances the venue from rigid authenticity claims while giving the kitchen room to move — useful in a CBD market where Italian competitors range from red-sauce trattorias to high-end regional specialists.

What does the drinks program look like?

Group Beverage Manager Matt Johnson built the bar program around house-made vermouth and classic cocktails, including savoury martinis. House vermouth production is a margin-friendly move: it shifts a core cocktail ingredient in-house, where a pour costs far less than a branded bottle and gives the venue a signature pour competitors can't replicate.

Head Sommelier Lee Hayward curates the wine list, which champions Australian and Italian producers — a dual-market list that keeps freight short on the domestic side while covering Italy's classic regions.

What does this change for the Sydney market?

For Applejack, Gonzo adds a first Italian concept to a portfolio that has never operated in the category, planted in a hotel-anchored CBD site with long trading hours — twelve hours a day, six days a week, from midday to midnight. That's a full-service window that lets the venue chase lunch, dinner and late traffic from a single room.

For Sydney's CBD diners, it means one more mid-market Italian option in the York Street corridor, with a format built for volume and energy rather than quiet fine dining.

Sunday lunch, when it launches shortly, will complete the seven-day cycle and round out a trading week designed to maximize the site's hotel-and-office catchment.