The turbulent times of Cafe Florentino

Restaurateur Rebecca Yazbek from Edition Hospitality – the force behind both Nomads in Sydney and Melbourne, and Melbourne's Reine and La Rue – has a habit of doing things the hard way. By her own admission, she has a weakness for opening restaurants inside heritage or otherwise difficult venues, which inevitably require the sort of problem-packed refurbishments that have council planning departments cracking their knuckles with glee. 

Witness, for example, her painstaking two-year transformation of Reine and La Rue, inside the neogothic former Melbourne Stock Exchange, which is now one of the country's most beautiful dining rooms.[[And which also has far better acoustics than anything with that much stone and marble, and ceilings higher than most cathedrals, ought to have. That can't have been easy – or cheap.]] That thing cost millions, and required the services of flurries of engineers and designers. But once you're there you soon realise you're happy to help them recoup some of it by paying $490 for a kilo of wagyu in exchange for the thrill of dining beneath those exquisite vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows.

Perhaps don't witness, however, her efforts to transform a former showroom with zero kitchen infrastructure, shoehorned into a tricky dog-legged laneway in Sydney's Surry Hills, into the bakery/winebar/restaurant hybrid Beau in 2023. That experiment was too complicated for its own good and Beau ended up closing 18 months later.