In a light-filled space from an in-demand design team, it’s serving almond croissants, pain au chocolat and gochujang scrolls, along with sourdough, focaccia and fresh-made sangers.
Community. Connection. Collaboration.
When cafe owners start talking in these kinds of terms, it’s easy for your eyes to glaze over. You’ve heard it before, a hundred times. You’ve watched those operators come and go, a hundred times. And often not through any particular fault of their own.
Breakfast and lunch venues – let’s call them, broadly speaking – are hard.
But Tom Cooney’s relative youth is deceptive.
He’s walked the talk longer than most, and has a calculated instinct for what works and what doesn’t.
His connections and collaborations date all the way back to Cup Roastery in Woolloongabba, and then run through all sorts of other venues, from the local outpost for Coffee Supreme to Hai Hai Ramen in Paddington to Anytime Coffee in the CBD. More recently, he’s best known for Riser, the picture-perfect bakery and cafe in bucolic Toowong that slays every weekend.
So, what’s he doing all the way out here, in Scarborough? It’s to open Landing Bakery with long-time business partner (since Anytime, recently sold) Jack Wakefield.
“Jack was born here and he knows this area really well, and he said to me, ‘We really need to do a bakery out here,’ and I said, ‘I don’t know about that,’” Cooney says, laughing.
“And then he said it another 20 times over the next three months. We came out and I sat with him at this very spot, looking out at the water across the park, and I thought, ‘We have to do it.’”
Cooney is still working through how he describes the difference between what comes from the oven at Riser and Landing. Because it is different. Maybe the former is more rustic while the latter cleaner and more classic, he says.
“When we make a croissant, say, at Riser, we’re trying to be more complex, deeply flavoured, and have some resistance and some chew to them. They’re an experience on their own.
“Here, it’s more classic and cloudy and as crispy as possible. That was our aim.”
It makes sense. If you’re visiting Riser it’s often a grab-and-go situation, given its popularity; the croissants and the sandwiches and the sausage rolls and whatever else feel like a unique expression of that venue, almost so you can take a little bit of it with you.
Landing feels more intended to eat in, or at the most maybe take it over the road to the park and enjoy under its strip of towering Norfolk pines.
That’s if you’re visiting, of course, but this is a venue designed very much for locals first. And as Wakefield suspected, it’s well timed to appeal to the growing number of city folk who are choosing to live out here, 40 minutes from the CBD.
When this masthead visits Landing during a soft service the Thursday before the bakery opens proper, they’re already buzzing around, filling the light and bright space designed by Five Mile Radius and Matthew Reynolds, with its handsome pale timber communal tables, and pigmented sand-cast and concrete furnishings (intended to reflect the red cliffs of the area), going large on baker Dan Smyth’s almond croissants, pain au chocolat, morning buns and gochujang scrolls.
Later in the day a clutch of sandwiches – a chicken salad, a Reuben (prepared with house-made pastrami), roasted vegetable and hummus, and a porchetta roll – come on-stream.
Like Riser, there’s a range of bread (plain or seeded sourdough, a country loaf and a focaccia) and an abbreviated selection of pantry staples on a shelf at the front door – jarred pickles, beetroot ketchup, smoked ketchup, tomato relish and bags of Fox coffee, which has also produced Landing’s house coffee blend.
“The idea is to bring something interesting here, when it’s building and wanting these kind of things,” Cooney says.
“You fill a gap. It’s a simple concept, really.
“It can be risky but we thought, ‘No, this is a good time.’”
Open Wed-Sun 6.30am-2pm
71 Landsborough Avenue, Scarborough
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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.
