Queuing Is a Serious Business at Sundays, Bondi’s New Scroll Micro-Bakery – With Good Reason

I am not a patient person. I’ve never left a teabag to brew for the specified time. I won’t wait for my food to cool. You’ll never find me lining up for a bar. I don’t like to wait – for anything. So, I’m surprised to report that I spent just shy of an hour and three minutes queuing for a cinnamon scroll on the weekend.

Obviously, I was not the only one.

Word has well and truly spread about Sundays, the new micro-bakery in Bondi. The cinnamon scroll spot has only been open for a few weeks, but thanks to 22-year-old owner Laetitia Loefti’s choice to document her opening journey on social media, the teeny Bondi Road shop already has a cult following.

She’s part of a generation that’s finding success in the hospo industry this way, joining the ranks of Homeboy’s Tom Oswald, Kelsey Gaffey of Melbourne bar Gracie’s Wine Room and fellow Bondi operator Cherilynn Yap of Up South.

“I didn’t really do proper advertising,” Loefti tells Broadsheet. “I was documenting everything. I was filming the painting of the store and when our electrician came, how literally nothing was going to plan, and how stressed the whole family was and I was. I put it up online and people really resonated with it.”

Judging by the small army of scroll-seekers and their little dogs who I did time with in The Queue, I’d say that’s an understatement.

Loefti studied psychology and then worked for a year in a corporate job before quitting to open her own business. Though it might seem like a risk to open with just one menu item – and a compact drinks list – she was confident.

With a love of cinnamon scrolls and no favourites in Sydney, she had her baked good. She also studied in the UK, frequenting London bakery Buns From Home. “They had this tiny store in London, I would go there every single week. I loved the whole vibe, and I really wanted to create something like that back at home.”

To perfect her own bun recipe, she worked with her mother Ellyn Loefti, who runs a food truck and catering company with Laetitia’s father. For months, they tested a different scroll recipe each day to find one that stays soft, rather than hardening up and becoming chewy.

“We called my grandma, who’s in Indonesia, and she had a bread recipe from when she was younger. She had written it on a napkin in Indonesian and sent us a photo of it. My mum and I were zooming in, trying to figure out what she wrote. When we mixed [my grandmother’s bread] component into our recipe for the scrolls, it was perfect.”

The texture is light and airy, almost like a pancake. It’s super squishable, and it bounces back to its perfect snail shape. Each batch of dough is cold-fermented overnight, then given time to rise twice more. It’s swirled into trays, baked, then the scrolls are iced. With that timeline and the size of the kitchen, they can’t currently scale up to cope with the demands of The Queue – or to stop selling out before lunch.

Sundays’ three core flavours are a classic cinnamon with cream cheese, Biscoff, and a Kinder chocolate scroll, leaving room for one special. Pistachio is the debut, but a coffee flavour is currently in the works.

The all-cold drinks list includes matcha twists and a coconut cloud coffee. The coconut cloud was inspired by a drink from New York’s Rhythm Zero, which Loefti follows on Tiktok. She whips a coffee extract with heavy cream and sweetener, then pours the airy cloud on coconut water.

See you all in The Queue again this weekend.

Sundays
211 Bondi Road, Bondi

Hours:
Fri to Sun 9am–2pm
Unless sold out earlier

@sundaysbondi