A former Gordon Ramsay Food Stars contestant is rolling doughnuts in cinnamon sugar, filling them with house-made jam and serving them with coconut soft-serve, beneath the disco ball at his Newtown shop.
It’s 9.30pm on Monday, and there’s a man selling fresh cinnamon doughnuts and drip coffee beneath a disco ball in Newtown. This is Rude Boy, a “doughnut shop that operates as a dive bar”, from former Gordon Ramsay Food Stars contestant Ash Straney.
The cinnamon doughnut is good, but Straney says the doughnuts filled with house-made strawberry and rhubarb jam, vanilla and tonka bean custard, or dark chocolate with Maldon sea salt are better. There’s also a sundae special: coconut soft-serve twirled atop a cinnamon doughnut, drizzled with thick mandarin oleo saccharum (citrus oil) sauce and topped with coconut chips.
Straney learned to make doughnuts during lockdown, and started pursuing the venture seriously after a single, chaotic weekend at The Cannery markets in Rosebery yielded $2200 in sales. “We rocked up an hour late, threw a curtain over the table, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, imagine what I could do if I tried harder and knew what I was doing?’” he says.
Rude Boy opened its first brick-and-mortar store on King Street in May, after four years selling doughnuts wholesale, at weekend markets, and from pop-up kitchens.
The venue brings together elements of Straney’s pre-COVID life: flavours of the Caribbean, from the seven years he spent in Panama, and cocktail bar energy, from his experience managing venues such as Bar Raval in Toronto, which made it onto the North America’s 50 Best Bars list in 2022.
The shop trades until 10pm daily, solving a distinctly Sydney problem: “I was always complaining that nothing is open late in Sydney,” Straney says. “When I lived in Toronto, I could sit down at a nice restaurant at 1.30am, but when I came back here, my only option in Newtown was a [pub or a] chicken shop.”
The concept has proved popular: “It was wild, we got so pumped I had to stop doing wholesale,” Straney says.
It’s a simple fitout, with stainless-steel kitchen, purple lights, and a makeshift counter beside the baking racks. Customers are served through a bi-fold window, and there are a few seats inside and out.
But this is just the beginning. Rude Boy has applied for a liquor licence and, on Thursday night, Straney launched Yaad, a pop-up eight-seat restaurant in Rude Boy’s small backyard. Straney cooks alongside his mother, trained chef Michelle Hardie, while diners share plates of coconut rice, patacones (fried plantains), yucca fries and Trinidadian doubles (flatbread with curried chickpeas) at a communal table.
“It’s inspired by the family meal we do in restaurants, before service, when everyone sits down together to talk,” Straney says.
The next event will be ticketed, and launched over email mailing lists and social media.
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Bianca Hrovat – Bianca is Good Food’s Sydney eating out and restaurant editor.
