Rafael Epstein is used to being recognised wherever he goes in Melbourne – “it’s usually the voice they pick, rather than the face”, he says – but at Tiamo on Lygon Street he’s so familiar as to be almost part of the furniture.

“I was brought here as a babe in arms,” the host of ABC Radio Melbourne’s Mornings show says. “As a child, at least once a week, I would have a meal at either Tiamo or Cafe Paradiso, which was across the road. This was my dad’s favourite haunt for about 60 years.”

Epstein’s parents, Joseph and Jan, grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne, but moved to Carlton when they went to the University of Melbourne in the 1960s. “Their brains, and their lives, just explode,” he says of the move. “It’s the ’60s! Carlton! They buy land before I’m born and build a house here. This is where they come into their own.”

Tiamo, which dates back to the 1970s, was a key part of his father’s world. “He’d saunter down the street, go to Readings and buy a copy of The New York Review of Books or the latest Phillip Roth novel, walk in here and order a scallopini and a white wine, take out his pen and underline bits.

“He was a workaholic. He’d work all night as a trauma surgeon at Footscray Hospital, come home, make me breakfast and a packed lunch, put on a fresh suit and go back into work for a few hours, and nip back here for lunch. This was his everything.”

The menu at this Italian stalwart “has barely changed” since it first opened, Epstein jokes. “The calamari is new, I think, since I was born. But other than that …”

He orders penne amatriciana and I get rigatoni with an oxtail ragu, and halfway through we swap plates because it’s that kind of place. We split a 500ml bottle of sangiovese. It would be rude not to.

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This strip of Lygon Street is “a huge part of who I am as a person”, says Epstein. “I brought my first girlfriend here [to Tiamo]. I brought my wife here when I first started going out with her. It’s as interwoven into my family history as our house, the synagogue, being Jewish. It’s foundational.”

Epstein’s mother, Jan, was an early music specialist, who helped set up festivals and a specialist magazine and toured recorder players, before turning her hand to movie reviewing, first for the long-defunct Melburnian (a local attempt at a New Yorker-style magazine), and then on radio.

“She was paid $300 or $400 for a 20-minute slot on 3LO with Clive Stark on Sunday mornings,” he says, incredulously. “In early-1990s dollars!” (Full disclosure: for years, I talked movies with Epstein on Fridays when he was hosting Drive; I now do so with his replacement, Ali Moore. My fee was a bottle of red each Christmas. On weeks when I couldn’t make it, he would draft his mother in as my replacement.)

At school, Epstein was good at physics, so science seemed the logical course at uni. But he wasn’t focused, and by the second year he had realised he had chosen a ridiculously hard path. “I was hopeless,” he says. “I failed every single subject. And then I asked for special consideration and they gave it to me, which was a mistake, because it meant I never went back and did the work. I never really learned that first half of maths and physics, so second year was a disaster.”

By third year he realised if he bolted on some subjects and did a combined science-arts degree he might be able to salvage something from the wreckage. But by final year, he still had no idea what he was going to do next.

“So I went to the careers’ counsellor at Melbourne Uni and she said, ‘Fill in this questionnaire’, a 20-minute multiple-choice thing. She tallies up the answers and goes, ‘I think you should do journalism’. So I went and did some movie reviews for the student paper.”

He credits his now-wife (who asks not to be named here) with launching his career. She wrote the cover letter of his application to the ABC, modelling it after the opening lines from Italo Calvino’s novella If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. “Sit down, relax, you’re about to read Rafael Epstein’s application,” she wrote. “Years from now you’ll be able to say it was you that discovered him.”

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It was, he concedes, “outrageous”, but it nabbed him one of 30 interviews from the 1000 who applied. And the interview landed him one of the two cadetships going that year.

TV was where the glamour was, but a big break covering the 1997 Thredbo disaster made it clear it wasn’t where he wanted to be.

As his radio colleagues from the ABC and rivals from the commercial networks darted around the mountain grabbing interviews and breaking news, he recalls, “I’m tied to this f---ing TV camera and this bloody satellite dish. You can’t leave them, everything has to come to you. It’s painful. That’s where I went, ‘Right, radio’. Literally, when the towers are coming down, you want to watch it on television; the rest of the time radio is better.”

“Plus,” he continues, “on TV, you have to wear a suit every day. I hated having to think about that and not the story.”

(For the record, Epstein is wearing a tech sweater and cycling shorts as we dine at an outside table; he’s ridden his bicycle here from the ABC after the end of his shift. In years of sitting opposite him in the studio, I can’t remember him ever dressing any differently.)

Other than a couple of years at The Age – he was part of the investigative unit, where he says he felt hopelessly intimidated by the prodigious talents of Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker – the ABC has been home all his career. When he got the call to come back in late 2011, he says, it was a no-brainer.

“They said, ‘Derek Guille is leaving the evening show, Lindy Burns wants to move from Drive to Evenings, would you like to do Drive?’ That was my job interview. It was about a 30-second phone call. I was like, ‘Sure, not a problem. I’ll come in, we’ll work out the package’.”

The move to Mornings has come at a time when ABC local radio is struggling across the country. When Jon Faine was hosting, he occasionally bested his AM rival Neil Mitchell on 3AW, pulling an audience share north of 12 or 13 per cent. In the most recent ratings survey, the ABC’s share of the 9am to midday slot (which roughly correlates with Epstein’s shift) was 6.7 per cent, compared to 16.9 for Tom Elliott on AW.

The official ABC line is that while they look at the ratings, they are just one measure of success. And it’s a script Epstein sticks to.

“Yes, ratings are important, but they don’t define us. What defines us is that the parliament has told us we need to inform, entertain and reflect. What an amazing gift, to be told by the parliament to go out there, inform, entertain, reflect.”

But when you see the audience numbers dropping, surely people inside the organisation must be forced to ask how well that brief is being met?

“Of course it does. But we would do that even if they were going up. Ratings literally define the life of those companies that produce commercial radio, because they are determinant of their income. That is not our purpose.

“I always want more people to listen, but what we look at is, are we achieving a whole lot of other things as well? If you want to have a serious, engaging discussion of what matters to people in Melbourne, that’s what I’m there for. I’m not there to be grumpy, I’m not there to tell people what to think. But there’s some serious stuff going on, and I revel, like a pig in shit, in a serious discussion.”

Of course, as an avid fan of popular culture and sport, he can mix it up too.

“Radio’s life, right? It’s got to be a bit of everything. You can’t be serious all the time.”

Speaking of time, the incumbents in morning radio in Melbourne have tended to stick around for years (23 in Faine’s case, 36 for Mitchell). How long do you think you might want to do it for?

“I’ve told them, ‘You’ll have to get rid of me, I’m sticking around as long as I can’,” he says.

“I love it. It’s f---ing amazing. It’s invigorating. It’s inspiring, thought-provoking. It’s energising, it’s mind-expanding, life-creating, keeps me going, provokes my brain and my soul and the marrow of my bone every day. It’s fantastic.”

Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.

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