Rollers Bakehouse

Sydney is a city obsessed with healthy breakfasts, mostly in bowl form and involving things like quinoa and maca powder. But the return swing of the pendulum also means we love a treat – the buttery the better – which is why people are piling into a baby pink garage in a Manly alleyway for croissants.

Those classic French pastries have been getting a lot of attention in 2018, with famed mathematically-perfect Melbourne purveyors Lune opening a second shop due to popular demand, and Textbook Patisserie in Alexandria filling their weekend pastries with things like taro milk tea.

But at Rollers Bakehouse they’re working on a rolling scale that starts at the classic plain croissant that they serve with unsalted butter and a housemade jam (on our visit it’s raspberry, strawberry and balsamic). The pastries are made with the same unsalted butter in a labour intensive three-day process that involves two lots of proving, not to mention the laminating on day two, where butter is rolled between sheets of dough over and over again to create those puffy, pockets of air and soft layers inside the crisp golden shells. Top marks for the classics.

Things get increasingly more elaborate from there. There’s a chocolate and almond croissant using a dough dyed black with activated charcoal; an intensely savoury and salty number with vegemite and aged cheddar; and one filled with blueberry cheesecake.

It’s not surprising that their best seller is the monkey bread, which involves them cramming muffin tins with the offcuts of the croissant dough, held together with banana, caramel and cinnamon – it’s set to take the crown from banana bread as the best breakfast cake.

Rollers is a two-man show, with James Sideris on baking duties and Bo Hinzack bringing the coffee skills to the fore, and you’re going to need the bittersweet caramel notes in the filter brew to balance out your pastry belly.

If you’ve had enough of buddha bowls and smug breakfast offerings and just want someone to pass the pastry, make it an all butter croissant from Rollers Bakehouse, the new champions for breakfast cake on the Northern Beaches.