The family-owned brunch spot serves one of the best value brekkies (with wood-fired bread and halloumi) in town.
After 35 years of serving wood-fired manoush and Lebanese breakfasts to the Guildford community, Yum Yum Bakery opened a second location in Concord on Friday.
You can’t miss it – the Concord cafe, housed in a corner terrace on Mortlake Street, is nearly double the size of its predecessor. There’s cosy booth seating, olive trees and the warmth of a hand-built masonry oven.
Toufic Haddad, the family patriarch who immigrated to Australia during the Lebanese Civil War, was lost for words when he saw the completed project for the first time on Thursday.
“He was taken aback, he couldn’t believe what we’d created, and mum wouldn’t stop crying,” says Haddad’s son Najib, who took over in 2015.
“You could just see [dad] had this glow about him that I hadn’t seen in quite a while.”
When Haddad opened Yum Yum Bakery in 1990, it was a small takeaway joint serving oregano “pizzas” and falafel plates to the local community. Now, it’s a bona fide icon of the Sydney cafe scene with two locations, multiple awards, and a customer base stretching from the northern beaches to Wollongong.
“Dad was very excited when we first announced we would open the second location … it was an emotional moment for him. He loves seeing how much the business has grown,” Najib says.
Najib grew up in Yum Yum Bakery, watching his parents and aunties work together in the kitchen, picking up shifts after school with his siblings, and learning to operate the oven. He loved the “old school bakeshop”, but he also recognised its potential.
With Najib at the helm, Yum Yum Bakery gradually evolved into a sit-down cafe with an earthy modernised look, specialty coffee and a range of new menu items, including filo-wrapped halloumi drizzled with honey.
Now when Toufic visits the Guildford cafe, as he often does, he’s greeted by multiple generations of diners who remember him fondly, as well a new crop of customers lured in by social media videos of big-value brekkie plates filled with puffy pita bread, fried eggs, pickles and labne.
“Social media broadened our reach to the greater community, and we were getting people coming from the north shore, the eastern suburbs and the south,” Najib says.
“They were always asking, when are you going to open another shop, closer to us? It’s something we’ve always talked about, but we wanted to perfect our menu and build a solid foundation and customer base first.”
While the Concord site has new additions like a heated outdoor seating area and private dining room, the Lebanese brunch menu, with dishes including lamb shawarma, awarma and egg, and fattoush salad, remains the same.
“Everything is a fusion of old and new,” says Najib. “We’ll never forget the grassroots store, but [at Concord] we can create more of an experience for our customers.”
Open 6.30am-4pm daily
50 Mortlake Street, Concord, yumyumbakery.com.au
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Bianca Hrovat – Bianca is Good Food’s Sydney eating out and restaurant editor.
