Mascot’s Three Blind Mice Wants To “Blow Your Mind” With Its Five-Cheese Toasties and Fromage Selection

A new provedore is bringing premium cheese, salumi and other enticing products from all over the globe to Mascot. Meet Three Blind Mice, the creation of two chefs who grew up and apprenticed together in Adelaide before spending years cooking in Sydney.

“We both love cooking, but we wanted to explore something different, drawing on all the contacts with growers and producers we’ve made in Sydney,” Daniel Hughes (ex-Manta), who co-founded Three Blind Mice with Milan Majstorovic (ex- Penny’s Cheese Shop), tells Broadsheet.

Among the current selection of cheeses you’ll find the first buffalo-milk blue made in Australia, from Berry’s Creek Riverine in Gippsland, Victoria, and the traditionally handcrafted Three Daughters Cheddar, which spends a year maturing in a stone silo at The Pines, a micro-dairy in Kiama.

The international scene gets a good look-in, too. Taste your way from Switzerland’s mountainous Zurich region, where Ur-Eiche, a raw-milk cheese washed with oak-leaf extract, is made in Girenbad Dairy, to Campania, Italy, from where buffalo mozzarella is flown fresh.

“None of our products are stocked in Coles or Woolies,” says Hughes.

Beyond cheese, there’s a salumi bar packed with a mix of local and international meats, as well as a cornucopia of other gourmet goodies, including organic breads, artisanal crackers, caviar, free-range eggs, nuts, dried fruits, pastes, jams, handcrafted chocolates and so on.

As well as peddling a takeaway range, Majstorovic and Hughes have put their cheffing skills to work, too. The tightly curated, ever-changing menu is made entirely with the products available in the shop. So far, big hits have included the five-cheese toastie, with or without confit duck, as well as the Tuscan flatbread panini crowded with mortadella, truffle-butter-milk stracciatella, toasted pistachio and fresh basil.

“Customers don’t have to order from the menu,” says Hughes. “You can choose a few ingredients and ask us to make up something for you, like a pasta or a tasting plate. We’re about giving customers the experience of tasting a quality product and blowing their mind, so they’re thinking, ‘I have to leave this place with that in my hand.’”

The 70-square-metre space has been designed with the same focus on customer enjoyment in mind. Hughes and Majstorovic worked with Michelle Schrijver to create an open, welcoming interior splashed with pinks and greens; it’s redolent of a French country village. There’s plenty of room to interact with the chefs – whether you want to watch them slicing salumi or just sample some cheeses – as well as seating for 16 indoors and 12 outdoors.

Since opening in early December, Three Blind Mice has been doing a busy daytime trade. The next step, to be executed over the coming weeks, is to open on Friday and Saturday nights for wine and cocktails.

Three Blind Mice
1/904 Botany Road, Mascot
0484 577 049

Hours:
Mon to Sat 8am–5pm
Sun 9am–2pm

@threeblindmice_mascot