Lucio's Marina

Noosa Marina, Tewantin

(07) 5470 2331

Executive Chef: Tommaso Belforti

Some restaurants arrive fully formed, carrying a lineage so deep you can taste it in the first bite. Lucio’s Marina is one of those places. Opened in November 2021 on the banks of the Noosa River at Tewantin, it brings with it three generations of Italian hospitality — and the kind of cooking that only a family with something to prove, and something to honour, can produce.

The story begins in Liguria, on the Italian coast, where the Galletto family ran Capannina Ciccio, a trattoria established by Matteo and Michela Galletto’s grandparents in the 1950s and still operated by extended family to this day. Their father, Lucio Galletto, eventually brought that tradition to Sydney, where Lucio’s Restaurant in Paddington became one of the most celebrated Italian restaurants in Australian history — renowned for its art collection, its handmade pasta, and a tagliolini alla granseola that appeared on the menu from 1983 and never left.

When Matteo and his wife Dieuwke Albertsma — who met at Lucio’s in Sydney, where she worked as a chef — decided to open their own restaurant, they chose the Noosa Marina. The connection was immediate and obvious: a waterfront setting, extraordinary local seafood, and a region whose food culture was ready for something genuinely Italian rather than vaguely Mediterranean.

The Tagliolini 1983 is on the menu at Lucio’s Marina — green tagliolini with Fraser Isle spanner crab, tomato passata and crab crumble — an evolution of the dish that made the family famous, now given to Queensland produce. It sits alongside dry-aged local reef fish crudo, Fremantle octopus carpaccio, Mooloolaba king prawns with prawn oil emulsion, spaghetti all’abalone, and a cappellacci filled with warrigal greens and ricotta on roasted cauliflower sauce and macadamias. These are dishes that understand both where they come from and where they are.

Dieuwke’s dry-aged fish programme — tuna bresaola, swordfish pancetta, kingfish lonza — is a quietly radical addition to the Noosa dining scene, bringing Italian charcuterie technique to Queensland waters. The result is a menu that feels simultaneously ancient and entirely of this place.

The restaurant seats 60, with a Riverside Lounge open Wednesday to Sunday from midday. The setting — calm, luxe, removed from the bustle of Hastings Street — rewards the short drive or the ferry ride from town. 

Lucio’s Marina is, at its heart, a love letter to the Italian table — written in Queensland ink, on the banks of the Noosa River, by a family that has been doing this since before most of us were born.