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Ricardo's Cafe owner Ricardo De Marco: Canberra's young gun tastes sweet success

He was just 19 when he opened his own cafe and knew little about cakes. Now it's one of Canberra's most popular venues which employs about 50 staff.

Natasha Rudra

Sugar rush: Ricardo De Marco was only 19 when he started Ricardo's Cafe, which now employs 50 people.
Sugar rush: Ricardo De Marco was only 19 when he started Ricardo's Cafe, which now employs 50 people.Jay Cronan

The thing about Ricardo De Marco is that he's not even 30.The cafe that bears his name - Ricardo's - has become one of Canberra's most popular thanks to the gleaming creations that fill the big glass cabinet in a bustling shopfront in Macquarie. There are rows of colourful macarons, gold-dusted mousse cakes, injectable doughnuts, cakes that recreate Golden Gaytimes, cakes in the shape of a bomb that are brought to the table with a lit sparkler fizzing in them. It's all hugely colourful and very Instagrammable.

And De Marco was only a teenager when he opened the cafe - a 19-year-old who had studied hospitality. "The cafe was very small, the shopping centre wasn't developed yet, it was still the old Jamison Plaza and I had no experience," he says. "I looked at it as university for me."

Ricardo's creations have become a sensation with Canberra's cake lovers.
Ricardo's creations have become a sensation with Canberra's cake lovers.Jay Cronan
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It was a big learning curve. He started out with four or five staff. "I worked at the back, just cooking and I had a couple of friends that finished college and I would get them to come and help out. It just slowly, slowly turned into this," he gestures around the cafe. At first Ricardo's did breakfasts and lunches and served coffee. The cakes came from suppliers ("we were like everyone else - we would buy them in"). But a few years in the MasterChef craze struck Australia and Adriano Zumbo became a national celebrity. De Marco was enthralled by the master patissiere and his creations. "It was a big inspiration seeing Adriano Zumbo and that sort of pushed it," he says.

So he started trying to make cakes. "I was cooking throughout college but was never taught pastry so it was just trial and error, you'd look up something, try it out," he says. "It [took] a long time to get there. If we showed you the first macarons we made and the other macarons we make now it would be completely different."

He's now 28, employs 50 people and has expanded the cafe three times. On weekends the place is packed and there's a red rope out the front for the queue and 16 staff keeping things running smoothly. De Marco says they do "stupid numbers" on the weekend. "It would be over 1000 covers easily just in the morning, we're doing 100kg of coffee," he says.

I was cooking throughout college but was never taught pastry so it was just trial and error ... If we showed you the first macarons we made and the other macarons we make now it would be completely different.

De Marco grew up in Canberra's north, the youngest of three children (his brother and sister own the newsagency at Jamison). Their parents, Tony and Rose, owned the IGA supermarket at Florey at the time and worked long hours to provide for their family. "To me it was normal to work seven days a week, stupid hours, never go home, so that's how I grew up," he says. "You meet people who haven't seen that and they think that's crazy. So that's how I got the work ethic. It's funny because Adriano Zumbo had the same upbringing - his parents had an IGA too, and his parents came from the same part of Italy as mine."

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He played sports through school and thought it might be a career but it wasn't going to happen. Architecture and design appealed to him but he couldn't bear the thought of being chained to an office. It took college to sort out his dreams and aspirations. "Hawker College really helped me develop what I wanted to do," he says. "I couldn't cook, I couldn't do anything like that." He tried a few different courses and then tried hospitality and "things fell into place". A stint working at the Yarralumla cafe Beess and Co sealed the deal. "The girls there were really nice, they were so lovely - they basically created who I was. So a lot of Beess and Co were who I was."

At the moment he's in charge of the cakes, changing things around, and refining new ideas, and that means lots of time in the kitchen. A typical day starts at 4.30am with a gym session. "I get here about 6.30am-7am and I'll be here until about - well with me doing the cakes I'll be here until about 9pm," he says. "And that's pretty much it." He admits the hours don't allow for him to go out much, though he does do a bit of property development as well.

Stepping up: Ricardo De Marco now plans a second cafe in Woden.
Stepping up: Ricardo De Marco now plans a second cafe in Woden.Jay Cronan

Inspiration comes from some of the foods his parents sold in the IGA. "A lot of the stuff is childhood memories, like Nutella and Milo and Jaffas, it all comes back," he says. "We had a cereal cake, we called it the Cereal Killer. We used Froot Loops, we used cereal milk in it and it was just a reminder of the flavours you grew up with in a cake. We sprayed it white and then put a syringe straight through it and then put raspberry through it so it looked like it was bleeding." Part of the appeal of his cakes is that people love the theatre of them, he says. "We use a lot of brands from the supermarket, we've done [cakes inspired by Golden] Gaytimes and Magnums. We grew up with the products, so we're just trying to bring the flavours back, recreate it in cake form."

De Marco says the cafe's also popular because "90 per cent of the menu" is gluten free. "We started off almost by accident doing it and realised that it was a big selling point," he says. "And we're good friends with the allergy centre at Jamison and a lot of people come from all over Canberra to go to them because they really specialise in that." So he figured the cafe should pull its weight and cater to them. "Especially cake, it's hard to get gluten free cake. I think the old range was heavy on mousse and dairy so we're trying to break that down a little bit and do more textures and flavours in between, so sponges, and daquoise and crunches. We use almond meal instead of flour."

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Social media is also part of the success story. "It's silly not to do it," he says. Ricardo's has been on Facebook since 2011 and De Marco regularly posts pictures of his latest creations - a peanut butter and jelly mousse cake covered in gold nuts, a caramel latte cake filled with coffee, a high tea spread. Instagram allows him to keep up with trends and other patissieres' work. "I love Instagram because I'm just following so many different chefs. Adriano Zumbo started the inspiration but now there are about 20 other chefs who have provided inspiration for me, it's just amazing seeing what they come up with," he says. Burch and Purchese, the Kettle Black and Chez Dre are among his Instagram heroes.

Closer to home his heroes include world barista champion and ONA Coffee founder Sasa Sestic, whom he says is a friend. Like Sestic, De Marco wants the capital to have its moment in the sun. "It's good having this network in Canberra, we want to put Canberra on the map in Australia," he says. He doesn't see why anyone would need to leave Canberra for Sydney or Melbourne to make their name. "I don't even see why everyone has to go to the city, I didn't want to go to the city. You don't need to do that," he says. He looks around the cafe, which is filling up again with an afternoon tea crowd. "People don't just expect this in the suburbs, in a shopping centre."

De Marco says he eventually wants to be able to step back a little from the 80 hour weeks in the cafe. And have kids of his own. "You can't do it forever and in a couple of years time I'm going to be 30 and I want to be able to have a family and not do this," he says. "My parents worked so hard to give us the life where we could do what we wanted. But I never saw them, I never got to see them, we never did family trips, I never saw my dad because he was working and my mum would be rushing around, picking us up from school, cooking us dinner and then going back to work." It was not, he stresses, a bad childhood. "I want to give my kids time with me. My parents worked hard so that I didn't have to do it. But here I am doing it. But I want to have a family. There has to be a life after Ricardo's and that's what I want to do."

Right now, though, there's plenty more to do - including getting ready to open a new cafe in Woden. It's not going to be called Ricardo's. Instead, it'll be a new concept, with room to experiment and play around with new food ideas in a smaller, more intimate space. "I think I got to a stage where I was like you can't do this forever but I'm happy. I make cake for a living. That's pretty fun."

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Default avatarNatasha Rudra is an online editor at The Australian Financial Review based in London. She was the life and entertainment editor at The Canberra Times.

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