Coffee up — Local Paddo

Paddington is experiencing a café boom, with a raft of new venues slipping quietly into the area in a diverse range of streets and places. The most significant arrival has been Bake Bar, which has taken over the former Gusto café site on Glenmore Rd at Five Ways. The cafe opened in December with a unique menu and streetside dining.

And Boundary St is home to two new cafés. Kaska, run by Daniel Blackman, a former owner of Potts Point’s popular Room Ten café, opened quietly at 1/19A Boundary St in spring. It has a lovely dining room, an excellent café menu and newly introduced outdoor seating. Despite launching without any media or fanfare, Kaska has already attracted a loyal local clientele.

Not far away, also on Boundary St, Potts Point’s La Fontaine patisserie has opened a spinoff in the former Stranger café site, near Sandersons Mercedes-Benz. La Fontaine is known for its excellent croissants and tarts and its Parisian-café fit-out looks very sunny on this stretch of Boundary St.

Meanwhile, on the upper end of Oxford St, Sandwiches by Bootleg has opened with a killer list of sangers, from Reubens to Katsus. The airy café/takeaway comes with a twist — everything on the list is plant-based.

“It’s a sandwich shop that just happens to be plant-based,” owner Sam Overton told Broadsheet in November. “I want people to understand that good food is good food, regardless of what it is made of — and nothing beats a good sandwich.”

The takeaway is a spinoff of the Bootleg Italian restaurant, also owned and run by Overton, further down Oxford St, near William St. And on William St, the arrival of The Hood in mid-2022 has been warmly received by locals.

“Being in Paddington has been great,” The Hood’s Jay Park says. “It’s a very local community, people are very supportive.”

Park says the café has tried to offer an eclectic menu of café classics plus dishes that draw on the Asian heritage of the staff.

“We do a lot of things with Korean or Japanese influence. We might do roasted tofu with house-made kimchi with edamame and almond, or a Korean-style bibimbap, or a Japanese curry. We focus on serving locals more than anything else with good-quality coffee and good-quality food.”

We’ll drink (lattes) to that.