The people in the cars that thunder along neglected Parramatta Road hardly give a thought to the businesses they are passing by. We stopped and had a chat.
As it waits, and waits, for a long promised transformation, Parramatta Road remains saddled with a reputation as a "scar through Sydney's heart", in the words of former planning minister Rob Stokes.
The State Government's Parramatta Road Urban Transformation Strategy, unveiled six years ago, involves plans for 27,000 new dwellings, 50,000 new jobs and a rapid bus service, but it has been on hold waiting for traffic studies to be carried out. An Implementation Update released last year gave the go-ahead nonetheless for planning proposals to start being lodged with the NSW Department of Planning and Environment (DPE).
A spokesperson for the DPE told Inner West Review the department and Transport for NSW expected to finalise the traffic studies over the next month.
"Once they are completed, it will be over to councils to progress planning proposals that will clear the way for tens of thousands of new homes and jobs along the busy corridor," the spokesperson said.
On another front, as part of the $198 million Parramatta Road Urban Amenity Improvement Program, the Inner West Council has been spending its $22.5 million share on upgrades not on Parramatta Road, but on the streets that surround it such as Renwick, Norton and Rofe streets in Leichhardt. Aimed at bringing Parramatta Road "back to life", the improvements, says one business owner, have had an opposite effect by removing car parking spots where customers of their Parramatta Road business could once park.
The frustrating saga of Australia's oldest highway is far from its final chapter, but in the six-kilometre section that passes through the inner west LGA, there are family businesses that just keep doing what they do, some with memories of when the road was busy with foot traffic and lined with thriving businesses.
They have lived their working lives on this road. For some, it is even home. Beyond the place where Parramatta road is an intractable issue, a political football, a scar ... here are some of their stories:
Pan Roma
397 Parramatta Road, Leichhardt
Antonio and Erminia Villanti turned a burnt-out shell of a shop just around the corner from Norton Street into Pan Roma restaurant. They opened in 1973, an era when people came to Parramatta Road in Leichhardt to shop at Italian specialty food stores.
As children in Lipari, Sicily, Antonio and Erminia were next-door neighbours and ultimately remet and married in Australia after their families had emigrated here in the 1950s.
Now in their 80s, they are as hands-on as ever in the family business, working alongside their two children Anthony and Margaret who practically grew up on site. "I've been here since I was nine years old," says Anthony. In 2022, they are building back up to pre-lockdown opening hours while still keeping their tables socially distanced. "We're going well because we are family. If it weren't for family, it'd be hard," Anthony says.
A large family portrait with pride of place in the restaurant is a snapshot in time from the 1980s, the arms of a teenage Margaret draped around her brother as they all relax over a drink after another busy night of service.
She remembers when this part of Parramatta Road thrived with fruit shops, delis and butchers, and can recall all the shops that used to be - a bank, a dress shop, a chemist, Gould's book store - in the now rundown strip directly across the road.
Decades on, and Pan Roma is the second oldest family-run Italian restaurant in Sydney after Beppis in Darlinghurst.
It has scant online presence, and doesn't even do takeaway, choosing to concentrate on the customers at hand. For nearly half a century, the Villantis have relied on word-of-mouth to build a clientele that comes from all over Sydney, some of them now third-generation customers.
"We have so many different dishes every week," says Margaret of the long daily specials menu which has a special focus on fish, bought fresh from Sydney Fish Market and cleaned and filleted by Antonio. At other times they will buy a whole pig and use all of it, making sausages, porchetta and pork belly.
"We have the same customers all the time that come back week after week, sometimes twice a week; if we just stick to the same menu, we would not be able to make them happy," says Antonio.
People come specifically to places along here because there is no foot traffic like there used to be, just passing cars now.
- Antonio Villanti
He still enjoys the business after 50 years. As well as being the fish guy, he helps wherever needed. Erminia, Anthony and Margaret, meanwhile, all cook the Pan Roma menu, while Margaret's daughter helps wait tables on the busy weekends.
Working so closely for so long, they must be a seamless unit.
"We fight for two seconds and then we're fine, we get over it - there's no use holding a grudge," says Margaret.
Says her dad: "We mainly argue on how to make a dish better."
As to where Parramatta Road's fortunes are headed, "We just don't worry about it - our customers will find parking to come here any way," says Antonio. "People come specifically to places along here because there is no foot traffic like there used to be, just passing cars now."
Euroespresso
165 Parramatta Road, Annandale
Marcello Nadile, owner since 1986 of Euroespresso in Annandale, has a vision for Parramatta Road, given the plans to add 27,000 new dwellings along its length.
"When people start living along Parramatta Road, the services underneath is what they will be looking for - shops might even adopt a European standard where we close off at 12, have a long lunch, and reopen at 4pm," he says.
"That would be a great thing because things always quieten down in the middle of the day, and when people come home from work, what are they going to do? They will do their shopping on Parramatta Road hopefully, and not go to a shopping centre."
We talk to each other and we support each other. You become part of a community when you have a shop like this.
- Vera Nadile
Marcello and his wife Vera, both Italian born, live on the strip themselves, having raised four daughters in the residence above their shop. Those daughters, now in their 20s, still live upstairs, where double-glazed windows at the front keep the traffic noise out.
Like other businesses that have endured in the face of non-existent foot traffic, Euroespresso is a destination shop: people come from all over Sydney to buy its Italian coffee machines, grinders and a large selection of beans roasted by Marcello at the Nadiles' Marrickville factory.
Marcello's siblings, Frank and Rosina, also work in the shop, as do his daughters on weekends: having grown up in it, "they understand the business really well," says Vera.
Euroespresso has been importing La Pavoni machines since 1968, and the Nadiles continue to supply them to cafes as well as homes and offices. It is also a hub for other business owners in the area, who pop in for coffee, pastry and a chat.
READ ALSO: 'Grungy' Enmore icon's riches to rags tale
"It feels like a village around here - the inner west Parramatta Road village," says Vera. "We talk to each other and we support each other. You become part of a community when you have a shop like this."
The people on Parramatta Road, she says, are strong survivors "and it comes from basic hard work - you get in there and just keep going. You take the good with the bad."
Surjit's Indian Restaurant
215 Parramatta Road, Annandale
Surjit's somehow achieves the distinction of being famous and a well-kept secret at the same time. It's been serving authentic Mughlai cuisine in Sydney since 1985 and on Parramatta Road since 1994, including to the likes of the international cricketers of Australia, the West Indies, England, Pakistan and India.
As well as ornate golden chairs and a tandoor oven that diners can see in action through a window, a precious collection of cricket memorabilia is on display, some of the biggest names in the sport having signed jerseys, photographs, bats and books, in tribute to their friends Surjit and his son Rasan.
"Best Indian in the world and great mates too," says one jersey. It is signed by the late Phillip Hughes, who wore it as he made two centuries in his debut Test against South Africa in Durban in 2009.
"It is one of the most precious things I could ever get," says Surjit Gujral, whose passion for cricket and connections with its community run extremely deep. Cricket, he says, is the religion of India and, perhaps only half-jokingly, "any Indian who doesn't know about cricket, is not an Indian."
Surjit grew up in Chandigarh - the 1980s cricket captain Kapil Dev was a childhood friend - and came to Australia in the 1970s to join his parents and help his brother, who had established in Chinatown one of only a handful of Indian restaurants in NSW.
The menu on Parramatta Road today (butter chicken is its signature dish) has an unbroken connection to the dishes Surjit's mother taught him to cook, and which he in turn has taught to his own son Rasan. And there is a third generation coming up: Rasan's 12-year-old son Dilraj will take to the floor in tie and suit to talk to customers. Like his Dad, his favourite dish is the tandoori lamb cutlets.
A lot of people feel that this is their little hub, that they don't like to tell anybody about it.
- Rasan Gujral
"The menu has my mother's love in it," says Surjit. "My mum was one of the biggest influences in my life, who taught me everything, who helped me in everything. She was one of the greatest cooks I have ever seen."
On any given night, diners will have come from far and wide in Sydney, as well as locally, and not for the first time.
Says Rasan: "A lot of people feel that this is their little hub, that they don't like to tell anybody about it. They call us a diamond in the rough, because of Parramatta Road."
After remaining closed since the latest lockdown restrictions were lifted in order to concentrate on a massive backlog of wedding catering, Surjit's is reopening this month - and father and son can't wait. "We want to get back in there, shake our customers' hands, give them hugs, talk to them and see how they are going," says Rasan. "It is not just a normal restaurant, it is a place where people put their heart out to us."
Surjit calculates that 80 per cent of customers are regulars.
"I have a lot of respect and regard for all those people who have been with me for such a long time," he says. "Some of them have become family, part and parcel of this place. Because of them I am alive, it is as simple as that."
Keeping it sweet for Easter
PAUL'S CHOCOLATES
760-762 Parramatta Road, Lewisham
IT'S the busiest time of the year right now for third-generation chocolate maker Alex Melikyan, who this year is making Easter bunnies almost a metre high and weighing three kilograms for one of his clients, Harris Farm Markets.
Alex was a small child in the mid-1980s when his grandfather, Paul, and father Diran, moved their chocolate factory from Alexandria to Parramatta Road in Lewisham. At that point they exclusively made branded after-dinner mints for hotels and restaurants across Australia, including in the inner west. Alex remembers as a child eating the sort of hamburgers with the lot "that you don't get anymore" at a Lebanese-run takeaway just up the road.
Paul had begun making chocolates in Istanbul after World War II, before emigrating to Australia in 1956. Alex joined the family busines in his 20s and was running it with his Dad until his father's death three years ago.
Now, Alex works seven days a week, supplying delis, groceries and florists nationwide with chocolates that range from foil-wrapped love hearts for Valentine's Day and bunnies and eggs for Easter, to chocolate-covered nuts and liqueur- and cream-filled truffles. As well as Easter and Valentine's Day. Christmas and Mother's Day are the busiest times of year. And demand by restauranters for after-dinner chocolates is in the midst of a resurgence, Alex says.
"Manufacturing is a hard business; you have to know how to run a factory, and keep the machinery going," Alex says.
"We do have a little shopfront, but it's not much of a pedestrian thoroughfare - it's more if someone knows us, they will come in."
As to the reasons for his family business's enduring success on Parramatta Road, as so many other businesses have fallen away: "We have got a product that people want," says Alex. "And maybe it is because we are not a shopfront, we are a factory, it doesn't matter where we are."
Have something to say? Send a letter to the editor at: editor@innerwestreview.com.au
Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can access our trusted content:
- Bookmark Inner West Review
- Make sure you are signed up for our breaking and regular headlines newsletters
- Follow us on Facebook
- Follow us on Twitter
- Follow us on Instagram