If you live in Sydney’s inner east or inner west, it can feel like there’s an AP bakery on every corner. If you ask us, that’s a good thing. It’s AP’s city – we’re just living in it.

There’s AP House, the flagship atop Paramount House; Newtown’s AP Town; AP Place for the CBD; the much-loved Carriageworks market stall; and cream bun stop AP Supply.

This week a new postcode enters the stable: Darlinghurst, with AP Bread & Wine. Each AP has its own unique selling point, but the latest is doing something that no AP’s ever done before: dinner.

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The team – Russell Beard (Reuben Hills, Paramount Coffee Project and Paramount House Hotel), chef Mat Lindsay (Ester, Poly), Ping Jin Ng (Paramount House) and baker Dougal Muffet – has moved into an 80-seat sandstone cottage with heritage features. There’s a sun-baked front courtyard, a grown-up dining room (with fireplaces and open shelving housing bottles of wine), double-heighted ceilings and a jacaranda tree in the back garden.

“The space came across our radar a while ago,” Muffet tells Broadsheet. “Mat initially was thinking about a restaurant there, but it kind of had the old bones of a bakery … that’s where the concept of AP originally came from: a bakery that’s kind of a kitchen.”

There will be pastries, of course, including Darlinghurst-exclusive baked goods.

“We’re trying to not just cut and copy, so every store has a unique offering,” says Muffet. “We’re focusing less on just croissant dough [and] derivatives of, and trying to lean into being a bit more traditional – a little bit old world like the building is.”

One thing Muffet is particularly excited about is the brioche. “We’re mixing these naturally leavened brioche doughs in the style of a panettone, so it has no acid. It takes us three days to make the thing. It’s super geeky baker stuff.”

From 7.30am, there’s a sweet brioche knot, a brioche danish with Moonacres blood plums, whisky canelés, a frilly carrot cake and old faves like buttermilk croissants and Aleppo scrolls.

All-day breakfast includes a saucy chicken, egg and cheese muffin that’s “kind of a Japanese rissole meets a McDonald’s muffin”; a whopping oat pancake topped with whipped honey butter; “drowned eggs” in a punchy chicken broth; and “pizza for breakfast” – think last night’s slice, but heaps better.

When lunch kicks in, a fat and fancy rissole is sandwiched in thick-cut shokupan, and blue mackerel sangas are sauced up with green zhug; then there’s a big salad and a daily pasta that’ll change regularly. For the opening bowl, “leftover bread pasta” – extruded on-site using a meal the team makes from dried and ground fenugreek and sesame loaves – is swirled with anchovies and bright slices of zucchini, then topped with deep-gold breadcrumbs.

But, AP fans, you’ll need to wait for dinner, which Muffet says will be in the mix in the coming weeks. What do we know? The menu will be “snacky and wine-oriented food that can be shared alongside a glass or bottle of wine”.

The pasta extruder will play a part in the menu – as will traditional pastry techniques. “We’ll definitely be doing a vol-au-vent, that’s for sure,” he promises.

An ice-cream machine is already in, churning a malty croissant-flavoured scoop. There’s a strawberry and umeboshi gelato, too. Lindsay is busy testing a buckwheat gelato ahead of the dinner menu.

From midday (and during the eventual dinner service), drink from a menu by Paul Guiney (ex-Bentley Group). Pre-batched freezer cocktails, Italian and Japanese digestives, and non-alcoholic shrubs are all in order but, as the name of the venue suggests, the wines are the star of the show – and there are 12 by the glass.

AP Bread & Wine
32 Burton Street, Darlinghurst

Hours:
Daily 7.30am–3pm
Dinner service to come

apbakery.com.au
@a.p.bread