Lune Rosebery (Nearly) Has an Opening Date, and Kate Reid’s Excited About the Fit-Out

She knows. She knows! She knows, okay?

Kate Reid knows it’s been nearly five years since she announced that her world-famous croissant shop, Lune, was branching out from Melbourne to Sydney.

She knows that, since then, we’ve had a pandemic, a wild economy, three Olympic Games and a new prime minister who’s almost served his entire term in government. And that babies born back when Lune said it was coming to Sydney, at the beginning of 2020, are now about to start their first year of school (with nearly all their adult teeth).

Reid is also well aware that it’s been three years since Lune opened in Brisbane (unfair!) and two years since she confirmed that Lune Sydney would be opening on Oxford Street, in 2023. And we know that the Oxford Street plan didn’t happen. That the timeline was shifted to 2024, but that we would be getting a second Lune in the same breath, at the new Martin Place Metro station.

Reid also knows that it’s been six months since she announced the move from Oxford Street to Rosebery, where Lune Sydney’s flagship will live in the flash new Engine Yards precinct. Everyone, for years, has been asking when – or whether – Lune Sydney (Sydney’s Lunes?) will open. Us, you, her. And now it’s finally – no actually, no seriously for real this time – going to happen. Really soon.

“If it’s any consolation, no one wants it more than me,” Reid tells Broadsheet. “I can only say how much I love our customers for being so patient and still wanting it rather than giving up on it.

“We’ve had this dream of opening in Sydney for so long, and I feel a great sense of responsibility to deliver something spectacular.”

So why, four and a half years on from that wordless announcement post, do we still care so much about a croissant shop from Melbourne opening in a city full of excellent pastries? Isn’t it a bit ridiculous that this is one of the biggest openings in Sydney this year?

“I know how many amazing bakeries are in Sydney, and I’ve got plenty of favourites,” Reid says. “But I think there’s a place for all of us, and I still think there’s no other business in the world like Lune, including in Sydney – we’re trying to transcend being a bakery and actually just being an experience.”

And that’s been the case since day one. Reid famously comes from outside the hospo world. She studied aerospace engineering, which took her to a dream role with a Formula 1 team. But eventually her dreams changed, and she decided to make a serious go of her other passion: baking. At first, this meant a small bakery in the bayside Melbourne suburb of Elwood. But things really kicked into gear in 2015, when Lune moved into space-age-looking Fitzroy digs, inside a cavernous converted warehouse.

Then, in 2016 the New York Times article came out. The big one. It said that Reid’s classic, precision-engineered croissant “may be the finest you will find anywhere in the world”. A star was born. Lune’s already locally adored pastries had cracked the international big time. As a croissant-loving lunatic living nearby at the time, I saw the queues out the door go from being pretty long on weekend mornings, to new-iPhone-coming-out long every day of the week, all the time. I’m talking hundreds of metres of croissant-crazed and cruffin-curious fans. I’m talking busloads of tourists, coming straight from Melbourne Airport to get their hands on a box of these things.

That one article added rocket fuel to the Lune trajectory, and Sydney’s been clamouring for a bite ever since. A few years ago, after I moved to Sydney, a colleague went to Melbourne. She came back to the office with a stacked Lune box that she’d taken on her flight as carry-on. Through security and everything. Taking croissants cross-country to a city filled with them. That’s Lune. That’s how much Sydney wants one. And that’s what it’s getting in – if all goes to plan – just over two months.

“I also want to know when it’ll open, and it’s not locked in yet, but I feel like it’s safe to say the end of November,” says Reid. “That’s our best-case scenario, and I’ll be absolutely stoked if that happens.”

Whenever it does open, Lune Sydney will have a slight case of Back to the Future: it’s in a converted warehouse, eerily similar to the iconic Melbourne flagship.

“Due to circumstances outside of our control, we needed to start looking for a new site at the start of the year,” Reid says. “And we were shown this one, and it just gave me such Fitzroy vibes: from a similar era, the vaulted ceiling, even the size and layout.

“Sometimes the stars just align for a weird reason – and this feels like a really natural way, 10 years on from opening Fitzroy, to re-create that Lune experience, and potentially even elevate it.”

If you’ve been to Fitzroy, you’ll know about the cube. The glass-encased workspace where pastry maestros are locked in, crafting the expertly engineered pastries atop a glossy slab of stone. The stone is a Lune signature, chosen especially for each of the production stores. Sydney’s was sourced via Artedomus and is “reminiscent of nougat”, with rivers of cream and pink throughout. Then there’ll be Easter eggs dotted throughout the build, nodding to Lune’s origin story and the history of the building.

“We create spaces that replicate the city around it,” says Reid. “We’ve repurposed some of the old materials that were recovered during the restoration of the Engine Yards, which you'll see in the design detail.”

Put off by the queues? Don’t be. “[We know] the line is something that's become synonymous with Lune,” she says. “We’re going to have this beautiful semi-circle, rammed-earth entrance that’s quite narrow, that opens you up into the space. But in the rammed earth, there’ll be these channels cut out that have the menu as they sit on the counter, like our pastries. So as customers are lining up, they can actually see when they’re still 10 or 15 customers away from the counter.”

Rosebery’s tight menu will be identical to its other locations – only croissants, and select members of the broader laminated dough genus, are allowed. Kouign-amanns, danishes, cruffins, escargots and twists: in. Most other things? Out. Lune Lab, a dining experience a bit like a croissant omakase (yes, seriously), will eventually join the offering too.

You can expect to see the Martin Place satellite store come into orbit not too long after this main one opens.

It has been an odyssey to get to this point. And for what? Are Lune’s croissants actually the best in the world? Maybe. They’re pretty bloody good. And there’s a strong argument that right now, the best pizza in the world is in Tokyo, not Naples. So why can’t Melbourne, or now Sydney, have the best croissants? Who says they have to be in Paris?

One thing’s not up for debate: no-one is treating a pastry as quotidian as the croissant with more respect, and reverence, than Kate Reid is at Lune. So even if you’re locked into your local and your pastry needs are currently being met, you must go and see what all the fuss is about. And soon you’ll be able to. (For real this time.)

Watch: Lune Rosebery Is Almost Here – Here's a Look Behind the Scenes
It’s all in the details when it comes to Lune’s Sydney store – especially when it comes to the place where millions of world-renowned croissants are rolled out. We went along with Kate Reid to carry on a design tradition ahead of the bakery’s much (much) anticipated launch.

Lune Sydney is slated to open in Rosebery Engine Yards in November 2024.

@lunecroissant