Four to Try: Brisbane’s Best New Bakeries

Lune Croissanterie

If you know Melbourne’s food scene, you know Lune. Originally opening in a tiny hole-in-the-wall in 2012 before relocating to its Fitzroy flagship, co-owner Kate Reid called upon her background working as a Formula 1 aerodynamicist and a stint in Paris studying the meticulous art of raw pastry-making to produce buttery, flakey croissants served fresh from the oven. Lune’s long-awaited Brisbane outpost – all concrete, tiles, glass and high ceilings – opened in August across two immaculate Hogg & Lamb-designed spaces beneath The Standard – a 30-storey residential tower on Manning Street.

On the street is the retail shop, where a line of convection ovens punches out croissants (some twice-baked), pain au chocolat, kouign-amann, morning buns, Danishes and cruffins. Coffee is by Coffee Supreme. Out back is the Cube. It’s an enormous glass box temperature controlled to 18 degrees Celsius. Here, the Lune team prepares its pastry over three days using local flour, eggs, milk, and local and imported French butter – the most important of which is a preservative-free Beurre D’isigny butter from coastal France used for the laminating process.

Agnes Bakery

What started as a pop-up to generate cash flow will now bake on in a permanent outlet on the corners of James and Harcourt streets. Agnes Bakery is a change of pace both for owners Ben Williamson, Bianca Marchi, Tyron Simon and Frank Li and regular architects Richards & Spence. An old Queenslander corner shop has been given a lick of white paint and a new brick floor, otherwise it’s a marble counter, a coffee window, some timber shelves, and that’s pretty much it. The simple treatment means your attention is drawn to the rows of doughnuts, pastries and sweets that fill the window, and the enormous four-tonne oven, which can bake 24 loaves of bread at a time (much of the renovation involved reinforcing the building’s supports to cope with its weight).

Agnes’s bakers are preparing an expanded range of items, with five different types of sourdough (seeded, malted, smoked potato, fruit loaf and gluten-free), mini Basque burnt cheesecake, kouign-amann, a range of danishes (including a savoury number with toum and potato), breakfast rolls (a smoked potato bun with bacon, egg and German relish), chocolate tarts, and cinnamon and jam doughnuts (plus a rotating special doughnut – in the first week it was tiramisu and chocolate).

Sprout Artisan Bakery

Rebecca Foley and Lutz Richter kicked off Sprout in the Food Connect kitchen in Salisbury in 2014. The following year, they made their debut at the Saturday Fresh Market in Rocklea. And soon enough Sprout was supplying cafes and providores such as Merriweather, Sourced, Botanica and Felix for Goodness. The growth has been slow and steady ever since. In 2018 Sprout moved its baking operations into a larger space on Commercial Road. In 2020, a wildly successful pop-up in the old Jamie’s Espresso space led their landlord to offer the couple a longterm tenancy further up the hill on the corner of James and Harcourt streets. Finally, in early June 2021, Sprout opened its own permanent shopfront.

The fit-out is a less-is-more combination of textured grey walls and black timber floors, the focus a glass cabinet filled with creations such as custard tarts, savoury bostocks (brioche toast), savoury and seasonal-fruit Danishes, berry croissant baskets, and double chocolate croissant buns, all created using organic, sustainable flours from Gunnedah’s Wholegrain Milling, and Corman butter imported from Belgium.

There’s also a croissant toastie, for which Richter developed a technique to flat-laminate croissant dough. The real draw, though, is arguably Sprout’s sourdoughs, which are prepped, fermented, shaped, rested and baked in a process that takes up to 72 hours.

Floss

Since opening in 2018, Florence in Camp Hill has become one of Brisbane’s best cafes. Its creative, wholesome menu is backed by Parallel Roasters coffee and an impressive selection of baked goods (baked in-house by star pastry chef Jade Halloran). Now, owners Elizabeth Florence and Sam Pethely have launched Floss, an online store dedicated to the latter.

Floss offers a selection of whole cakes, including a golden chiffon cake with blackberry compote and Italian meringue buttercream; a mandarin, cumquat and sage almond cake; and a rich mocha and walnut meringue layer cake. Other baked goods include biscuits and mini cakes, such as chocolate, walnut and rose cookies; honey za’atar shortbreads, and mini yuzu-curd meringue cakes. A number of the items are gluten-free, dairy-free and nut-free.

Halloran and her team bake everything out of an old garage behind Florence, which has been converted into a commercial kitchen. To place an order, visit the website and order at least 48 hours before pick-up, which is at the front counter of the cafe. Delivery can also be arranged if needed.