Meet Tad Lombardo Melbourne’s Best Chocolatier
Tad Lombardo started his business at the Market in 2009 and quickly became Melbourne’s best chocolatier (and Prahran Market’s resident one). From a humble beginning on an Artisan Cart to his own purpose built chocolate shop, Tad talks about his achievements.
Transcript:
“I started my business, Cioccolato Lombardo in 2009 . I did that for a year while I was still transitioning from the Engineering through to Chocolate. At that time I wasn’t sure how it (chocolate shop) would work out and whether it was a sustainable business to actually be have so I did the two consecutively.
In 2010 I decided to make it my full time job – I’ve been doing it full time now for five years.
I would describe my chocolate as very personal- I don’t make something if I don’t like it myself, which sounds selfish, but that’s just the way I am.
I also put a lot of myself into it (the chocolate) – a lot of the things from my childhood that I liked with eating chocolate, well, I try to do that now using good ingredients and to replicate those sorts of things.
I’ve had a lot of creative inventions in my time, and some of the ones I’m most proud of is the Pukeko Egg that I do with Ben Shewry at Attica. Ben is a close friend of mine but the Pukeko Egg was one of the first chocolate dishes that I got- and it gave me the confidence to know I was actually good enough to continue this as a business.
That dish took us three months to develop- and more than 80 iterations to get it right. Another one (creative invention) is a sourdough chocolate bar that I developed for Prahran Market’s 150th birthday celebrations last year, which has been one of the most popular sellers I’ve had. It’s fun to incorporate ingredients that are unusual, but still palatable of course. Sometimes people come into the shop and think “it sounds awful”, but those are the people who come back every week to buy a bar of it.
There have been a lot of career highlights in the last five years and one of the ones that I think is the best is obviously being able to work with Attica. That’s a dream come true – and to still be doing that five years on is incredible. One of the other ones is that I’m someone who has never won anything in his life before and I’ve won a few awards – the champion trophy in 2012 for the best box of chocolate – I also won a gold medal that year and a silver medal this year. So to be at a level where people actually acknowledge you in that way is quite incredible.
I like many things about Prahran Market- I love Prahran Market, and one of the reasons why I wanted to set my business up as a base here and why I spent so much time on the Artisan cart to start with to build it up is because the fact that this is Melbourne and Australia’s best food market.
When people come here, they come for quality, they come for the expertise, the knowledge and to talk to people about food and to talk to people who are selling the food and have direct connections to the producers. It’s important to know the province of where their food is coming from – and it’s that direct connection that I think is really important and I wanted to be a part of that.”
You can find Melbourne’s Best Chocolatier, on our website, here.
