Coffee and Design: Two Sydney Cafés Doing it Right.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a café with good design MUST serve exceptional coffee…
They say don’t judge a book by its cover, but we all know cafes have their tell-tale signs. Picking the right cafe to spend your pennies is like choosing the right restaurant or hotel: subconsciously or not, your eye always gravitates towards good design.
A beautiful, considered layout and attractive ambience speaks volumes about the quality of food, beverage and service you can expect. For this reason a cafe with truly great coffee won’t ever have to shout it from the rooftops. If you have to display a neon sign that reads World’s Best Cup of Coffee in your window, chances are you probably don’t make the world’s best cup of coffee…
If a truly great cafe brags about anything, it’s about their selection of rare and traceable coffees, highly qualified baristas, or freshly baked pastry offerings made in-house by their resident chef. But nine times out of ten the devil is in the design.
“Design is the new marketing”, according to Seth Godin, “It is the product itself, not the ads or slogan… but design requires a point of view, the confidence to make an assertion, and the skill to turn that assertion into something that resonates with the people you seek to serve.”
So let’s take a look two Sydney cafes that resonate.
Veneziano Coffee, Surry Hills
With polished concrete, a sleek lineup of white La Marzocco machinery, one large communal table and pops of neon, Veneziano is a design-driven minimalists’ dream.
Choose from black, white, filter, or bottomless batch, and accompany your choice with an Organic Bread Bar pastry, or doughnut if it’s a Wednesday. Once seated have your coffee served to you in a hand-crafted cup by Byron Bay ceramicist Sit Still Lauren, and enjoy in full view of one of Sydney’s state-of-the-art barista training studios.
Single-O, Surry Hills
Surry Hills is the place to be if you ever find yourself on the hunt for great coffee in Sydney. In full contrast to Veneziano’s pared-back interior, Single-O is a mix of bold and playful street style. Known for their house-roasted single origin coffees and self-serve batch-brew bar (yep, you read that correctly), this is the place to visit if you’re after a kickass black coffee tasting experience.
From an interiors point of view, Single-O makes their mark in the way they display a daring yet cohesive clash of textures and patterns that one would never think to combine. You’ll spy forest green tables; gunmetal grey and orange terrazzo bench tops; polished concrete flooring; black and white line art (which mirrors the mural in the laneway opposite); apricot tiles; recycled wood panels and matt bronze finishes. It’s reminiscent of a Melbourne laneway, with added class.
The menu is equally bold, with odes to both Australian native ingredients and their Tokyo roastery. Another combination you would never typically pair. You’ll find Banana bread with Vegemite butterscotch, ‘Kanga Snags’ and ‘Croc-ettes’ (crocodile croquettes served with a Japanese curry sauce, poached egg and pickled ginger), just to name a few. You may raise an eyebrow but you wouldn’t dare second guess because– like every aspect of their design concept – every element is executed with flawlessness.
Not Sydney-based? Don’t fret: Both are renown coffee distributers across the country, so chances are there’s a cafe near you stocking one of their blends.
Have you visited either of these locations? And which cafes would you add to this list?
