For a site once bemoaned for being Sydney's version of Melbourne’s dreary Docklands, the plans for Barangaroo are starting to sound really exciting; food spots from an impressive list are slated to begin opening from early next year. The line-up includes Noma’s 10-week pop up, Balmain’s Efendy, Bourke Street Bakery, Maslows cafe and Coffee Alchemy. The latest reveal is that Shortstop Coffee & Donuts, a central player in the viciously competitive donut game in Melbourne, will open at the site on April 1 after being approached by Lend Lease developers to cross the border.
Sitting next to Bourke Street Bakery’s new shop, Shortstop co-owner Anthony Ivey – who founded the business with Sinye Ooi – says a second location has been in the works for while, but when they were approached about Barangaroo they just couldn’t turn it down. Ivey even took his head chef, Naomi Halligan, back to the USA on a donut-inspiration trip (somebody’s got to do this awful-sounding job), checking off Portland, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Chicago. “We’ve also been up in Sydney recently, and it’ll be a lot of fun. It’s a good market up there, it’s pretty fresh, and there’s not really anybody doing quite what we’re doing yet,” he says.
The shop will be a bigger space than the Melbourne CBD store, where the team pumps out around 1200 doughnuts a day, all of which sell out. “We get a lot of Sydney people travelling down to the Melbourne store. They take boxes and boxes back on the plane. We’ve had people from Sydney buy 40 or 50 donuts in one go,” says Ivey. Can he blame us? What poor deprived souls we are, having to deal with the cronut takeover for months on end now.
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SIGN UPShortstop Sydney will sell four forms of donut. The traditional yeast-raised ring donuts are made with vanilla, whole milk, cultured butter and nutmeg, and glazed with flavours such as maple-walnut and brown butter, or dusted with cinnamon, cardamom and sugar. Yeast-raised donuts sans hole are piped full of seasonal fillings. The flavour of Shortstop’s cake doughnuts are infused into the batter as well as glazed on top, such as Earl Grey tea and rose. The real showstoppers are Shortstop’s French crullers, made from a choux pastry piped into rings and fried, before being topped with Australian honey and sea salt. They’re the shop’s best sellers, no question.
Ivey and Ooi will bring Market Lane coffee to the Sydney branch, serving American-style filter, espresso, black or white coffees in one size only, while Adele Winteridge from Foolscap Studio is taking care of the fit-out, (she’s also working on the design for the Noma pop-up). Opening day can not come soon enough.
Shortstop Coffee & Donuts will open at Barangaroo on April 1, 2016.