Source : the age
Susan Koh wasn’t always a baker. Instead, she started her career in fashion in her native Singapore.
“I was actually a fashion designer and a fashion buyer for Polo Ralph Lauren in Singapore,” Koh says. “But when my husband and I migrated to Brisbane 16 years ago, there weren’t so many of those jobs here.”
So Koh started baking at home and would return to Singapore regularly pre-COVID for “very basic training” as a pastry chef. Later, she mastered her trade working in Brisbane at cafés such as Dello Mano – celebrated for its brownies – and Florence in Camp Hill.
Still, you can see the designer’s eye in Koh’s new café, Nos. Bakehouse, which she opened with chef Hank Lyu earlier this month. It’s in the lovingly thought-through fit-out, with its vintage furniture and light fittings, carefully arranged framed pictures on the dining room wall, and winsome garden setting out back.
It’s also in the immaculate cakes and sandos the cafe is producing out of its cosy Annerley Road premises, formerly Penny Coffee Co and before that, a Fujifilm development lab.
“They’re definitely related,” Koh says. “In terms of baking, it helps a lot – I like to put my own little twist on things. In terms of designing the shop, it helps a lot because you know what works in terms of colour and so on.”
Koh and Lyu’s menu has changed since they first opened Nos. Bakehouse, simply because of the number of punters they’re getting through the door. Gone are a bunch of brunch dishes, allowing the kitchen to better focus on a short menu of super fluffy, mini yamagata-style sandos, and luscious, Instagrammable desserts.
There are five varieties of sando: brulée egg mayo, ham and cheese toastie, tuna mayonnaise with caramelised onions, ebi prawn with mayo, and chicken tender with mayo. All are relatively small one-handers served with the baked bread’s top still intact, the prawn and the chicken fried katsu-style with a panko crumb.
The dessert menu is similarly efficient: there’s a decadent French toast made with the same sando bread and served with baked Japanese milk pudding and fruits, a yuzu brulée cheesecake, a twice-baked chocolate cake with crème anglaise, and ube (Filipino purple yam) cheesecake.
Koh and Liu have also applied their imagination to the drinks menu also, which features a lavender iced matcha and iced latte, and a Basque iced long black, where cheesecake is served atop a coffee and torched, brulée-style. Elsewhere, there’s a selection of teas, juices and chai. Espresso and specialty coffee is fuelled by Sydney’s Five Senses.
Going forward, Koh says to expect a greater variety of sandos and for brunch dishes to make a comeback as rotating specials.
“We still have customers asking about the mains,” Koh says. “It’s just a question of kitchen space right now. But once everything is settled we can bring that back.
“But I think it’s been popular so far because the interior of the cafe is really comforting. It’s chill. It’s nostalgic. It’s somewhere the customer can come and sit down and simply be with their family, and that’s what we’re after.”
Open Tue-Sun 7am-2.30pm
Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.
