“It’s very unusual to get a bakery in the city,” Cam Reid says. “Like, somewhere that’s actually baking in the city.”

As the Lune Croissanterie co-owner points out, think of all that space you need to run a fully-fledged bakery. It’s hard to achieve in the CBD where real estate is at a premium.

Reid, sister and Lune founder Kate Reid, and business partner Nathan Toleman should know, because they developed their own solution before opening a Lune Croissanterie in Melbourne’s CBD in 2018. The Lune team would roll and shape its raw pastry in the temperature-controlled production kitchen at its larger Fitzroy outlet, and then transport it in a refrigerated van to the city where it would be proved and baked on-site at the relatively small 68-metre outlet on Collins Street.

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“It’s not hard to go into a city cafe and get a pain au chocolat. Most cafes get supplied pastries,” Reid says. “But that pastry maybe got baked at 5am in the morning. We’re baking that product fresh. You can walk in the door at 2pm on a Thursday afternoon and get a croissant that came out of the oven 30 minutes ago.”

Reid says the Melbourne CBD site is Lune’s best by far in terms of revenue. It makes sense, then, that he, Kate and Toleman are now making a similar play in Brisbane. In mid-August, Lune will open a 45-square-metre bakery on Burnett Lane in the CBD; its pastries will be rolled and shaped at Lune’s enormous South Brisbane kitchen, which was designed from the outset to have capacity to feed satellite sites.

The new store will live at the Albert Street end of Burnett Lane, tucked into the laneway side of the recently refurbished 89 Adelaide Street building. Like its Melbourne CBD forebear, it will run a reduced menu designed for easy grab-and-go – think a lemon curd cruffin, a pain au chocolate, a kouign-amann, and classic, almond and ham-and-gruyere croissants. There will also be an espresso bar serving coffee from Coffee Supreme.

“Having a shorter menu drastically speeds up the service, so it makes it accessible for city-dwellers,” Reid says. “Not having a lot of customer space doesn’t matter because we find in city venues, people just want to smash a ham-and-cheese and a long black and get out of there. They’re not coming in for the whole experience.”

Melbourne-based Ewert Leaf is in charge of the fit-out – Reid says to expect a levelled-up variation on Lune’s usual cool-concrete industrial look. Otherwise, it’s designed to fit in with a laneway that already boasts a clutch of celebrated venues: Death & Taxes, Alba Bar & Deli, Super Whatnot and Felix for Goodness.

“There are so many great operators there already. But it’s also a legit working lane,” Reid says. “It hasn’t been closed off to traffic with bollards like a lot of Melbourne laneways. It’s a great city laneway that could be anywhere in the world.

“We’ll be baking fresh and hopefully luring people up the lane with the smell. And maybe there’s a bit of a queue – it would be great if we were embraced like that … I go to parties and mention what I do, and people don’t know Lune but will say they love the Woolies buttered croissants! And I love that people don’t know us. There’s a brand new regular waiting around every corner.”

Lune Croissanterie will open in Burnett Lane in mid-August.