First Look: Lilla Bakehouse Has One of the CBD’s Most Inventive Bakery Menus

At the new Queen Street bakery Lilla Bakehouse, you’ll find the standards: coffee, matcha, sandwiches and baked goods. But the pastry cabinet also houses many playful Asian-inspired bakes.

Owners Bamboo Yue and Shi Yi Sim met at the Halim Group’s gluten-free bakery Kudo in 2023, where they were both working as baristas while studying at the William Angliss Institute. The pair quickly bonded over a shared dream of opening their own cafes.

They had each tested the waters before crossing paths. In 2019, Yue started a coffee shop in Shanghai called A Calling, and Sim was running an online micro-bakery in Brisbane that specialised in macaroons.

After working as bakers – Yue at Le Croissanterie and Sim at Lovely Patisserie – they teamed up to launch Lilla Bakehouse last weekend. They take nostalgic Asian flavours and work them into drinks and baked goods. “I want [the menu] to feel fun and familiar, so people get excited just reading the names,” Yue tells Broadsheet.

From kaya (coconut jam) scrolls to a corn matcha, here are five Lilla Bakehouse creations worth stopping by for.

Kaya scrolls – $7.50

Cinnamon scrolls are having a moment. There are many twists on the classic, and Lilla adds to the pack with its kaya riff.

Brioche dough is rolled up with a sticky swirl of kaya and gula melaka (a type of palm sugar) before it’s baked. It’s then finished with a generous slather of kaya cream cheese frosting. The kaya is made from scratch at the bakehouse, with fresh pandan juice folded into a custard-like mixture made of coconut cream, eggs and sugar. It’s also used in one of Lilla’s matcha lattes and shio pans (Japanese salted butter rolls).

Steamed egg sandwich – $14.50

There are three made-to-order brioche sandwiches at Lilla. One of them is a steamed egg sandwich starring a tamago-like egg block inspired by Korean steamed eggs. It’s seasoned with prawn furikake and a drizzle of chilli oil from Melbourne brand Six-Eyed Scorpion.

Okonomiyaki financier – $6.50

Sim and Yue are particularly fond of sweet and savoury pairings. So they developed an okonomiyaki financier, which meshes the savoury Japanese pancake with a French vanilla almond cake. The classic financier is topped with imitation crab, extremely umami okonomiyaki sauce, Kewpie mayo and bonito flakes.

Corn matcha – $9.80

Sim first encountered the unlikely pairing of corn and matcha on Tiktok. The pastry chef says the two pair well as the natural sweetness of corn balances out the bitterness of matcha. It took a few tries to find the right type of corn, but Sim and Yue eventually landed on the sweetcorn typically used in Korean corn cheese. For this drink, a house-made corn and sugar mixture is stirred through a matcha latte, which is then crowned with cream infused with corn and toasted kernels.

Sesame prawn shio pan – $7.50

Sesame prawn toast is a yum cha staple, but at Lilla it’s reimagined as shio pan. Each Japanese roll hides a slab of salted butter and a line of prawn paste, with the base coated in sesame seeds for extra crunch before baking.

Lilla Bakehouse
Shop 17/370 Queen Street, Melbourne
No phone

Hours:
Thu & Fri 9am –4pm
Sat & Sun 9.30am–4.30pm

@lilla_bakehouse