Italian Chef Fired Over Pineapple Pizza Refusal Loses Fair Work Bid

Australia's Fair Work Commission has dismissed a claim by an Italian head chef who says a Brisbane restaurant sacked him for refusing to put pineapple on pizza — a refusal he called "an insult to his culture."

The ruling, filed Tuesday, ends a dispute that cost both sides dearly. Chef Davide Tamburella lost his job at La Costa on 20 May, roughly two weeks after owner Elliot Ingram summoned him "to address performance concerns." One of those concerns, the commission heard, was Tamburella's refusal three separate times to serve pineapple on pizza.

What did the customer actually order?

The trigger was money. Ingram told the commission a large function arrived spending "in excess of $15,000," and the man paying the bill wanted a specific dish.

"We had a large function come in, and they were spending in excess of $15,000, and the guy paying for the whole thing says: 'Look, I need to get some ham and pineapple pizza,'" Ingram said.

To put that in context: a single $15,000 function at a mid-priced Italian restaurant can equal dozens of ordinary table covers' worth of revenue in one night. For a venue fighting rising costs, that order was not trivial.

Tamburella acknowledged this was the third time he refused the direction, the commission heard. Instead of complying, he asked Ingram to "check how important it is for Italians not to put pineapple on a pizza."

Ingram, for his part, did not claim to love the topping. "Do I go and buy a ham and pineapple pizza? It's probably not my absolute favourite," he said. "But I'm not going to turn my nose up at it, that's for sure. And, look, we have had ham and pineapple pizza on the kid's menu previously."

Seventeen years in hospitality and more than a decade running restaurants had taught him, in his words, to "pick your battles."

The irony is geographic. Queensland, where the restaurant sat, reveres the fruit so much that a giant monument has been built in its honour. A chef refusing pineapple there is something close to sacrilege for many locals.

The takeaway: a single topping preference collided with a five-figure customer, and the customer's wishes won.

What did the chef lose beyond the job?

Tamburella's stakes went far past a payslip. He was more than three years into a 186 visa process — an employer-sponsored route to Australian permanent residency.

Ingram says he waited as long as he legally could before notifying authorities that he no longer employed Tamburella, hoping the visa would be approved before sponsorship had to be withdrawn. It was not. The dismissal means the migrant chef must now restart the entire 186 process from the beginning — three-plus years of progress erased.

The commission also heard Tamburella allege his termination breached the Fair Work Act, partly because he had suffered a workplace injury: he struck a metal handrail and fractured his right hand in two places.

Commissioner Jennifer Hunt dismissed the general protections application. Her ground was procedural, not substantive: the claim was filed too late and did not meet the criteria for exceptional circumstances. The merits of the pineapple dispute were never adjudicated.

That distinction matters. The dismissal tells us nothing about whether the firing was lawful — only that the chef missed the filing window.

What happened to the restaurant?

La Costa no longer exists. The venue closed in July when its lease expired, with Ingram citing the high cost of doing business in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane's nightclub district.

The restaurant's website still promises an escape: "We promise, it'll only take a moment to realize you're not in Brisbane anymore, you've made it to the Italian Riviera."

For Tamburella, it took one ingredient to end that illusion. He was contacted for comment and now works at another Italian restaurant. Its menu, notably, contains no pineapple — though the commission's ruling leaves unresolved whether his original refusal was ever legally protected.