Giocondo/Primo Caon bring Italian style to Adelaide coffee lounges at Hindley Street's La Cantina in the 1960s

Primo Caon (left) and Giocondo Caon with their chef and mentor Leo Froschl at their La Cantina coffee lounge and restaurant in Hindley Street, Adelaide city, in 1964.
Images courtesy Primo/Giocondo Caon

Primo and Giocondo Caon were prime movers in bringing an authentic Italian approach tofood and drink in Adelaide.

Among other Italian and Greek migrant families, Primo and Ciocondo were born and educated within the Adelaide city square mile from the 1930s where their father ran a butcher’s shop. Starting with La Cantina in Hindley Street, Adelaide city, the Caon brothers would open a string of restaurants – Rigoni’s. Charlie Brown’s, Caon’s, Chesser Cellars, Grimaldi’s – that influenced South Australian dining culture.

Their genesis in the food and drink business could be traced to Giocondo being inspired by the relaxed elegance of the cafes and restaurants he saw on his trip to Italy with his mother Guiseppina in 1955, after he's finished his schooling.

The pleasant cultural shocks for Giocondo, at 17, started on the month-long trip to Europe aboard the Strathaird where a Spanish dancing troupe entertained: “I was completely blown away by the dancing and the noise and the castanets and the guitar playing.”  In Europe, he loved to walk and “to see people sitting in a sidewalk cafe with a tablecloth on a table or having a glass of wine or whatever, or a coffee, or a panino, a little sandwich, you know, it blew my mind away”.

Those impressions stayed with Giocondo, back in Adelaide and after compulsory national military service, and his vision for creating a sophisticated night place in Adelaide then the Black and White or Devon milk bars. The nearest to that vision was the Las Vegas Coffee Lounge, set up in Hindmarsh Square, Adelaide city, on the first floor of The Block, by Brian Webber and John Rosetto. The Camille coffee lounge at at inner eastern suburb of Hackney was similar with a more beatnik feel but Las Vegas was more popular, with 100 to 150 people queueing up for just cappuccino/coffee and toasted sandwiches – because there was “nowhere else to go”.

In 1960, Giocondo saw the elegant West's Coffee Palace façade in Hindley Street, Adelaide city, being divided into shopfronts. But it was the building’s basement, with its archways (a reminder of Italy) that inspired what would became the venue for La Cantina (the cellar). With the financial concessions from the basement’s owner, Hindley Street chemist Jimmy Cacas, and furniture from Peter Brown, Giocondo’s own renovation work enabled him to set up La Cantina cheaply in 1960. Its coffee machine came from the now-closed Las Vegas.

Giocondo was joined in the business by Primo and they ran it until 1969. They added to the coffee lounge with an upmarket dining called the  Bistro Grill, inspired by Melbourne’s Florentino bistro grill. Primo Caon hired Leo Froschl, an Austrian chef, whose claim to fame was cooking for general Ike Eisenhower after World War II. T-bone and porterhouse steaks, fillet mignon, chicken Maryland and oysters were the most popular dishes.

The Caons enjoyed the more liberalised liquor laws under premier Don Dunstan and made the most of every opportunity, such as borrowing a grand piano from Ron Pearce Music School upstairs that had gone out of business. A jazz pianist would play it on Friday nights.

La Cantina became an attraction that overcame any fears about going down into a basement in “ethnic Hindley Street”. La Cantina also had star power through Primo Caon’s link with local theatre and his wife Ramer Townsend, who was with the Borovanski ballet. Big names such as Robert Helpmann, Joan Sutherland, Marcel Marceau, Luciano Pavarotti (still in the opera chorus in the 1960s), Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn were among those who visited La Cantina after appearing at the Theatre Royal or Tivoli (Her Majesty’s) Theatre. It became a custom for the stars to leave their name scratched into La Cantina’s woodwork wall panels.

• Information from interviews with Primo and Giocondo Caon by Karen George in 1996 for the City of Adelaide oral history project.