Your Favourite Pastry Chef’s Favourite Pastry Chef Is Finally Opening a Bakery

Ask most chefs in Melbourne who makes their favourite pastries, and chances are they’ll say Charlie Duffy. Hugh Allen loves the former Small Batch pastry chef’s cheese chilli twist, and in September, Lune’s Kate Reid said Small Batch was the bakery she was “most impressed with at the moment.”

Duffy, who stepped away from the North Melbourne spot last week after five years, will open his own bakery this December. Daybaker will take over the former Little Molli site in Abbotsford. 

“I envision it to be this sort of modern Australian bakery,” says Duffy. It’ll expand on the baking philosophy he first started developing at Tivoli Road Bakery, then honed during his time at Small Batch. “[It’ll be] really focused on the craft of the baking and viennoiseries and the products – and that seasonality and working directly with farmers and producers and getting access to unique and special produce.”

The open kitchen and the shop’s floor-to-ceiling windows mean people walking past will be able to see Duffy and his team making pastries from the street. The focus will stay on laminated pastries – the items Duffy has built his reputation on. He’s currently excited about a new savoury pastry made with polenta from Turrong Farm in Mornington. Duffy will first make the polenta into a porridge before mixing it through a croissant “so you’ve got this yellow-specked, cracked-corn croissant dough.” He’ll then fold through a cheese, a spicy bomba calabrese butter and crunchy dried corn.

There’ll be a “thoughtful lunch offering” of salads, Roman-style pizzas and sandwiches made from house-baked bread. Plus, smaller cakes such as a Meyer lemon cake with whipped buffalo curd.

Duffy is set on making Daybaker a casual, down-to-earth place. “I think there’s a little bit of a juxtaposition with the detail-orientated, technique-focused, style of the product that I do. But I don't want that interpreted into something pretentious or too fancy.” 

Daybaker will open at 66 Nicholson Street, Abbotsford in December.