What do you get when you combine a pizzeria, gelateria, delicatessen and a coffee bar under one roof? The Coffee Warehouse Café and Deli.
Read More
Ona Coffee Manuka
Ona Coffee Manuka has gone back to their roots and reopened a café in Manuka, Canberra.
The site is the original café where Ona founder, Sasa Sestic, first found his passion for coffee six years ago. The roasting and wholesale business has come a long way since Sasa’s days of roasting coffee out of a storage container. With three other Ona cafés already established, the newly refurbished café in Manuka has opened its doors to the public once again.
Barista and Marketing Manager, Jack Scheeren, says the new café is a testament to where the company is at. “This [café] is what refuelled the roasting passion,” Jack says. “Coming back here was important because the Manuka community was the first to support us in the beginning.”
Owned by Aton Willie and Sasa, and run by Operations Manager, Caleb Evans, the new café has adopted a different look to its siblings – and features an espresso bar in a modern, industrial environment with a big exposed brick wall and timber benches.
The Ona signature blend remains the same from the day the business opened. Jack describes it as “black forest cake with some forest fruit berries, dark chocolate and a creamy texture”. The beans are roasted in Fyshwick, Canberra at the Ona Coffee House. Single origin beans are available and continually changing. Ona has recently sourced Panela sugar; a dried-organic sugarcane to match their coffee. Other brewing methods on offer include a cold drip tower, siphon and aeropress.
“We want customers to come and enjoy really good coffee and enjoy it in a relaxed, fun and unpretentious environment,” Jack says. “It’s all about educating people and sharing our passion for coffee.”
Ona Coffee Manuka is also working hard on providing good food to complement their coffee. Offering nice simple food, the Head Chef prepares the Barista Breakfast with poached eggs on sourdough bread and roasted tomatoes, grilled asparagus and a home-made chilli jam. The order is suitable for a breakfast that is not too big or heavy, but still tastes great.
Cold drinks are also available, including refreshing home made lemonade and raspberry coulis, ice teas and frappes – a popular treat for the summer season.
Vudo Café& Larder
Vudu Café and Larder is as much a café icon for locals as it is a popular hot spot for tourists. Situated in the mountainous resort town of Queenstown, partners Michelle freeman, Chris Vile and Rae Ellis opened Vudu as their second café, after the successful venture of long standing café in Beach street, Queenstown of the same name.
Read More
Bar Americano
A visit to Bar Americano is a little like entering a Roman Piazza and not a laneway in the Melbourne CBD. Like the Italians do, this café is all about the espresso – but here you sit and savour the coffee experience.
The sister venue of Der Raum in Richmond, this classically refined bar serves early morning espresso, afternoon aperitivo and night-caps.
Reminiscent of the european elements of eating and drinking, Bar Americano has created an environment for all coffee lovers to enjoy.
“We wanted to provide a simple offering,” Manager Matthew Rees says. “Our key influence was a simple Italian espresso bar with a vintage feel.”
The café’s name is a tribute to the intimate venues founded throughout europe in the 1920s to accommodate weary american travelers who would escape prohibition in their homeland.
These american bars encapsulated an era of drinking finesse and the newly opened Bar americano similarly pays tribute to the culture of cocktails. The menu includes a range of classic drinks including the Mammy Taylor, a Hanky Panky or a Chicago fizz cocktail.
Matthew Rees says the espresso bar offers an escape from the fast pace of city life and entices weary office workers from their desks into an intimate environment that celebrates the high quality craft of Italian-style espresso.
Bar americano uses Coffee supreme’s Boxer blend, that Matthew describes as offering a “classic, rich, espresso character”, and rotates single origin beans such as El Salvador San Emilio.Matthew says that while many city-goers still prefer their traditional lattes and cappuccinos, one third of his customers drink espresso and he’s hoping he can convert the rest.
The food at Bar americano is seasonal and incorporates a mix of Bruschetta, Danish pastries and baguettes with aperitivo served between 4 – 6pm.
“I enjoy adding something special to people’s day and the response we get from our guests is great,” Matthew says.
Yellow Bernard
There’s a little mystery behind the name of Yellow Bernard, according to mates and owners Scott Clements and David Jolly.
Without giving anything away, David can only say that the name represents the passion and perfection behind the business and their different personalities.
Yellow Bernard has only been open since April '11, but already the hard work and dedication is paying off. Neither Scott nor David come from a hospitality background; Scott is a carpenter by trade, and David a bicycle mechanic. What’s important is their passion for good quality coffee.
Scott and David started their coffee journey six yeas ago by drinking coffee, developing their taste, experiencing other cafés and sharpening their skills on their own home machines ever since. It appears their home experience has translated well into a commercial environment.“Having your own customers is pretty special,” David says. “To share our passion with a customer and see their face light up when we make them a nice coffee or see them come back with positive feedback its fantastic.”
The small, inner city café is largely based around a take away business. With only a few tables and chairs inside and outside the café, the interior is classy and clean with a timber grain bench top. The philosophy of Yellow Bernard is to focus on the coffee and not be too worried about food, although a little pastry cabinet with locally made croissants and danishes are available to accompany the coffee.
Melbourne-based roaster Gridlock Coffee supplies Yellow Bernard with their coffee, including a quality milk-based blend that offers a lot of acidity and sweetness. Single origins coffees are also available as an alternative to an espresso and are constantly changing.
David says people in Hobart are becoming more educated about coffee as they realise there are places they can go to get a good cup of coffee that matches up to Melbourne or sydney. A La Marzocco fB 80, straight from florence, is their prized toy and the first thing they ordered for the café.
Behind the scenes, Scott and David are competitive at the coffee machine and want to be recognised for their formal service, unconventional style and larrikin humour.
“We enjoy what we do and if people see us enjoying ourselves we think they’ll come back,” David says.
Caffeteca
A warm, casual, friendly experience is what you can expect at Maria Munari and Rosey Hill’s Caffeteca, located in the backstreets of North Adelaide. This espresso and panini bar has been open for two years, however it seems not all of their customers are happy about it.
“The locals get a bit annoyed because the secret’s out and they can’t get a table these days,” co-owner Maria says. “It’s a place you can come to relax, wind down, have a quality espresso, a bite to eat whether it be sweet or savory, and leave refreshed and ready to take on the world again.”
Along with her sister Rosey, the business partners have always worked together, making the transit into the world of coffee after running a gourmet deli business together for six years.
“We had a vision of what we wanted to do and we’ve exceeded our expectations in just a two year time frame,” Maria says.
Working closely with their roaster, D’Angelo Coffee, Maria says the blends on offer at Caffetecca are seasonal and change regularly. Using a Wega coffee machine, baristas Kaden Rohriach and Craig Schultz make an excellent espresso using a variety of available coffees, including the Tanzania Valhalla estate, known for its bright acidity, as well as a Dominican Republic Barahona, which is rich and creamy.
Italian by heritage, Maria and Rosey are passionate about producing quality espresso that is more body orientated with balanced acidity and sweetness. Other interesting coffees used in blends include a Fazenda Barreiro natural from Brazil with notes of fresh tobacco and honey, and the Nicaragua Santa Rita estate with a floral fragrance and sweet nutty finish.
Focaccias, paninis and the homemade Minestrone are just a few of the delicious foods on offer for the breakfast and lunch menu. “Our cooks are Italian ladies – so they bring a home style feel to our menu,” Maria assures. “at a lot of places, you can get good coffee and bad food and visa versa, I like to think we can do both right.”
Overall, Maria and Rosey say they’re just happy to be doing something they love. “We love the customer contact, the social aspects of it and the way coffee connects people from all walks of life,” Maria says.
The Lemon Tree
It took Daniel Haddad, the owner of this quaint newly opened café in Fairfield, a while to decide on a name. After scratching his brain for months, however, he finally found the answer in the citrus source in the café’s back yard.
The brightly coloured name is an appropriate label for this new venture, a family-friendly operation on a quaint side-street in Melbourne’s northern suburb. With space to spare and a kid’s corner with books and toys galore, welcoming guests young and old was a key goal for Daniel.
“There are a lot of young families in Fairfeild, so we wanted a kid friendly place with room for prams,” he says. “There’s plenty of space for moms to come in and be comfortable.”The café is also family run, with Daniel’s brother, father and aunt all pitching in. He completed all the renovations with his father, who built all the furniture, while his aunt and brother help out in the kitchen.
“I couldn’t see myself working for someone else,” says Daniel about why he chose to open the café. “It was always just a matter of finding a place.”
As a trained chef, Daniel overseas the menu with his aunt. The food is all home- made style Lebanese, with incredibly fresh dips, skewers, falafel and a great range of breakfast items.
As for the coffee, the company opted to go with Map after searching for a roaster who could help them grow their business. Daniel notes that as they were starting up, the Map staff were in there on a daily basis helping them set up. They even helped them find a barista – Dean – who is appropriately Italian to go with Map’s Italian roasted beans.
Omar And The Marvelous Coffee Bird
Andy Gelman is a strong believer in the saying: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
The day before Andy and business partner Dean Atkin’s Café and roastery was to open, the local council decided to pull up the main road outside their new location to fix the water drain. With restricted road access around the café for the first four months of business, andy and Dean remained optimistic and opened as planned.
“It was really shattering and a really tough time,” andy says. “We tried to maintain positive, at least we had really cool coffees and I got to spend time using the roaster.”
Omar and the Marvellous Coffee Bird has since celebrated its one-year birthday and it’s thriving in the suburb of Gardenvale. With a warm, industrial feel to the corner site, andy says his café had to offer a family friendly environment because of the suburban location.
“We’re really feeling the local loyalty,” he says. “Here, you get to know your customers by name, which is just the most awesome feeling.”
Andy roasts out of café hours on a brand new 12kg Probat roasting machine, which he describes as the best thing he’s ever roasted on.
Andy and Dean have sampled hundreds of coffees from around the world to get the right blends for the café. Their comprehensive list of coffees on offer are all unique and seasonal blends, including their special milk-based blend of Sumatran Aceh Mengaya and Guatemalan Finca La Providencia, and a Sumatran Aceh Mengaya for their black coffee that is full bodied with a rich and earthy sweetness.
Other single origin coffee from Sumatra, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Kenya and Panama are also available, including the Kenya Gethumbwini, a real standout served through the clever coffee dripper on site.Omar’s uses a La Marzocco machine and a clever coffee dripper.
The mentality behind the food at the café is simple: great produce served fresh. A variety of toasted flatbreads, salads and rolls are available for lunch, as well as a breakfast special of torn basil, tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella and extra virgin olive oil.
When buying beans to take home, the staff at Omar offer friendly advice on how to best use their coffee and what they can expect to get out of the coffee. no matter the difference in pallet, Andy says the team at Omar’s can find a bean that will be suited to any particular taste.
“When you sit down and spend time with a customer, trying different processing methods of coffee, they’re your customer for life,” andy says.
“I love my job, we feel so lucky we can come into work, try all these different coffees and somehow make ends meet.”
Java Coast Café
Tucked away in the heart of the Brisbane court precinct, down a narrow little alley way, is Java Coast Café, a haven for anyone searching for an escape.
Nearby the courtrooms of the supreme and district courts and the offices at the state Law building, Java Coast Café caters for the hectic worker and for the customer wanting a tranquil experience.
Read More
The Belaroma Coffee Centre
Entering the Belaroma Coffee Centre off the streets of Manly Vale, Sydney is like stepping into a different world.
The open wholesaler and café is covered with classic wooden furnishings and a world map imprinted on the floor, representing the variety of coffee’s Belaroma sources from around the globe.
The company has been a feature of the Australian coffee culture since 1968 and markets its coffees across cafés throughout Australia. Nick Chronis of Belaroma says the idea for the Belaroma Coffee Centre was born four years ago from “our desire to want to walk in our café customer’s shoes and better understand coffee”. “It doesn’t matter how our customers like their coffee, we will try to make it perfect for them every time,”.
The Belaroma Coffee Centre uses three blends, including their signature house blend Octavia, a lightly roasted blend of Arabicas that produces a rich, sweet and full bodied coffee. Nick says the most popular coffees amongst customers are milk-based espressos, however specialty single origins are also on offer.“We do substantial volumes of single origins and it actually shows and tells us our customers are more engaged and wanting to go on that coffee knowledge journey themselves,” Nick says.
The Belaroma Coffee Centre uses a Kees van der Westen Mirage Triplette Classic espresso machine, with baristas always grinding on demand and free pouring each shot. Tasting shots every half hour by the baristas also helps ensure the perfect coffee is going out to customers.
A large commercial roaster is used for roasting Belaroma’s wholesale coffee blends and a small batch roaster is also used on site to roast the specialty single origins every week. Customers can also get a hands-onexperience by roasting and blending their own coffee beans to take home.
To make your visit to the Belaroma Coffee Centre even sweeter, Nick recommends the cannoli as a great accompaniment. A fresh and delicious range of breads, sweets, savories and cakes are also available, sourced from local bakeries and producers.