Two Fives, Rosebery

Driving past Two Fives, the first thing I noticed was their cable-reel tables out front. About 10 years ago, when the industrial chic thing was really trending, I had a brief hands-on hobby rescuing these from demo sites and cleaning them up for exactly this purpose. It wasn’t particularly profitable, but at least I contributed to making a few cafes […]

Queens Park Kitchen

Oh how I love a fantastic cafe right next to a fantastic playground. My coffee was excellent. It wasn’t milky, watery or weak, just nice, hot, smooth and almost fruity-flavoured. The banana bread was baked in-house at Centennial Homestead, but there was nothing dinky and “homebaked” about it. It was a high-quality professional-looking-and-tasting banana bread – the kind you could […]

Pasture, Balmoral Beach

Pasture is a bit of a fancy place in a bit of a fancy location. Not quite fancy enough to be considered posh, but definitely fancier than your average suburban coffee place. Notice I didn’t use the word “cafe” – after having tried more enough “coffee places”, not everywhere that sells coffee is a cafe in my books. But Pasture […]

Vitaland, Alexandria

Vitaland *shudder*. If you can get over the PTSD, maybe you can consider Vitaland a cafe, and not just a place to park your kids for an hour. Let’s face it, the cafe here is pretty much incidental, existing solely within a huge kids indoor play facility. It’s an amazing place – we came for the little one’s birthday and […]

Tilt, Forestville

I wouldn’t describe Forestville as having a vibrant cafe culture and yet, at 10am on a weekday, all four cafes in this little suburban shopping village were packed out! Surely they can’t possibly all be good? They certainly don’t all look good, but as the newest and most prominent, Tilt is a bit of an exception. It looks like they’re […]

Leaf Cafe & Co, Top Ryde City

Leaf Cafe is an open-plan cafe right next to the indoor playground at the Top Ryde City shopping centre. It’s not a bad place to sit while your kiddos play, or to come for some quiet after dropping them at school, as I found out when it first opened back in 2016. Today, however, I had a much more hectic […]

Little Bear, Big Bear Neutral Bay

I used to be a regular at whatever cafe was in this spot 10 years ago, but Little Bear has only been here for 3 weeks. The place was a little sparse in terms of signage and decor, but being brand-new certainly explains that – cafes tend to develop character with age. For example, Rising Sun Workshop is absolutely oozing […]

Il Caffettino, Westfield Sydney

I almost didn’t see this cute little place, hidden underneath an escalator in the Westfield hidden underneath Sydney Tower. It had an old-timey Italian hole-in-the-wall style, so I was hoping it would be run by old-timey Italians serving classically rich espressos in tiny little cups. Unfortunately there was none of that, but the service was quick and I’m sure they […]

Swedish cafe, IKEA Tempe

Do all IKEAs have a cafe? I don’t mean the automatic machines where you press the button over your little pre-paid mug. I’m pretty sure they all have those. I mean a real-ish cafe, with an espresso machine and a barista (or two, this time), that will actually serve you a real coffee and a banana bread. The coffee was […]

The Farm Bethel, Killarney Heights

Today, I went back to my lil’ ol’ hometown. A tiny island of a suburb, Killarney Heights is almost like a little untouched time capsule from the 1960s, having been largely undeveloped. The houses are still on large blocks of land with plenty of space in between, which I find remarkable since in Newtown I can hear my neighbours speaking […]