At Luca Bakery, Larissa Takchi also invites customers to submit their family recipes for her to recreate as specials.
It’s tough finalising your order at Luca Bakery when its counter is stacked with oven-fresh pastries, breads and sweets lobbying for your attention. So here’s my pitch for the Monte Carlo: it tastes like the IMAX version of the classic Arnott’s biscuit.
Instead of a supermarket staple simply pressed with cream and jam, Luca Bakery delivers outsized flavour through sweet honey biscuits, a whoosh of salted vanilla buttercream and generous blitz of raspberry compote. You savour every high-impact aspect, just as you would admire dazzling pixels on a large-format screen.
The Castle Hill bakery is full of sweet and savoury goods to cushion bad days, but it’s remarkable in other ways too. The cafe is run by Larissa Takchi, who at 22 years old was crowned MasterChef Australia’s youngest winner in 2019. She opened her farmhouse-style bakery in August with husband Luke Dominello, and it has a charming way of redefining expectations. Take the cheesy zucchini quiche: you can taste every cracked egg and soft ricotta cloud that’s mixed through each slice. If you’ve ever done laps of desperation while hungry at a corporate event, only to be confronted by a rubbery imitation of a quiche, Luca Bakery’s rendition instantly wipes away those bad memories.
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Meanwhile, the cafe’s giant marshmallows, previously available in classic vanilla and salted-honey variants, are now soft raspberry pillows that magically dissolve as they kiss your tongue. “We don’t like to put too much gelatin in there, because it becomes a bit like a tennis ball – real bouncy and squeaky,” says Takchi.
I could tell you about the ever-changing scents that time-lapse through the bakery (melting butter and caramelising sugar as croissants are prepped from 3am; the spiced air that follows cinnamon scrolls) or how the counter has a measure for your proximity to nearby farms (the almond-thyme galette is roasted with peaches collected a few suburbs away).
But what makes Luca Bakery truly stand out is its open invitation for customers to bring in their culturally significant recipes and the cafe will try to recreate them. You’ll see a collection of requests on a corner table, all with a personal story attached.
Takchi’s passion for keeping recipes alive is long-running, sparked by her Lebanese grandmothers. They never documented any dishes they cooked, so Takchi diligently tracked the ingredients they used and measurements they made. (She also learnt how to make crostoli from her Italian best friend’s nonna.) In addition to the community warmth it offers, this sharing, restoring and adapting of customer recipes is straight-up delicious.
Take the Medovik honey cake, for instance, that’s ended up here thanks to instructions from an Eastern European friend’s grandmother. The biscuit layers are softened with honey cream over two days and Takchi adds the welcome scorch of roasted walnuts.
Luca Bakery is named after Takchi’s toddler and it follows a tradition set by her other cafe, Lily’s Local in Arcadia. That opened in 2023 and is named after her daughter. Some menu items at Luca originated with Lily’s Local, such as the brown-butter strawberry cake, which features a jammy doughnut sweetness in each bite.
A strong sense of family surges through Luca. The intensely citrus-fresh Cypriot cake is inspired by Takchi’s Greek aunty, and flavoured with the pulp and pith of boiled oranges. Glossed with burnt syrup, it’s so refreshing and sticky it’s like you’re a kid face-deep in half-time orange segments at a soccer game.
There’s also a biographical element to the olive focaccia with black garlic and parmigiana: it recalls a snack Takchi regularly made with sourdough, tapenade, honey and cheese when she worked at Wildpear in Dural. With olive-studded dough and a black garlic glaze, the flatbread channels its salty-sweet flavours effectively. Like many things at Luca, it’ll turn your fingerprints sticky – just one of many welcome ways Takchi leaves a personal mark on her menu.
Three more bakeries to try
Kiki Dessert
Inspired by Hayao Miyazaki’s charming movie Kiki’s Delivery Service, this bakery will transport you to Japan. It also offers honey cake with a Korean riff, biscuits with a Dubai chocolate crunch and French caneles. Say yes to the 12-spice cola.
12/849 George Street, Ultimo, kikidessert.com.au
Flour Shop
Breakfast-worthy Jerusalem bagels and wonderfully minimalist cinnamon scrolls often appear on Anu Haran’s counter. You might also find it piled with specials, such as chicken-and-potato curry puffs, feta-honey scrolls and a lush Hungarian walnut, apricot and dark chocolate torte.
16 Princes Street, Turramurra, flourshop.com.au
Khanom House
“Khanom” is Thai for dessert and self-taught baker Yeen Veerasenee gives classic baked goods an Asian remix here. Honey cake is layered with vibrant pandan custard and grated coconut, Basque cheesecake is deeply flavoured with Thai milk tea and cheese scrolls are spiced with kimchi.
15 Meagher Street, Chippendale, instagram.com/khanomhouse.syd
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