Badmanner Thymes Espresso

Parramatta is certainly upping the cafe scene with new cafes opening up thick and fast. One of which is Badmanner Thymes Espresso. I know not why it has an unusual name but I have made a note to ask the owners one day!

Badmanner recently started opening on Saturdays. Thank goodness or I would not have had a chance to check it out!

It is a rather small cafe space wise but they managed to add a lot of personality to the decor. A sofa resides against one wall, with a guitar to the side and some Art Deco posters add to the feeling of hipster.

On our almost noon visit, we ordered a combination of breakfast and lunch dishes.

Eggs Benedict with Smoked Salmon, Spinach, topped with home made hollandaise sauce on sourdough bread. The dish looked 'eggsmazing'!! Sorry, I had to make that one up! I had a bite to try and there was a nice combination of flavours.

Beef Bulgogi roll with marinated thin slices of oyster blade beef, pickled white radish, Spanish onions, sweet potato chips and spinach with home made wasabi aioli and served in a wholemeal soft roll. My first thought when it was presented to me was how on earth am I going to it this humongous roll?!?!? And it even came with cutlery and there was no way I was going to be polite while downing this delicious roll!

Tender, juicy beef with sweet slices of onions. The offsetting texture of the slight crunch of the sweet potato chips amidst all that beef was good. I personally would have liked the sweet potato chips to be even crunchier.

Dominique Ansel's Cronuts (New York City)

I start this post by stating that I am going to be honest and state up front that I did not intend to queue up for Cronuts when I was in New York City recently. Prior to my departure, I read about the hot new food craze called Cronuts. It was trending in the social media world and I read about the queues to buy them and my curiosity was peaked but not enough to make me want to queue up.

But while I was in New York City, on one of our group walks, I noticed there was a queue of people outside a bakery and looked up the sign to see which one it was. Lo and behold it was Dominique Ansel's Bakery! Imagine how surprised I was to find out that his bakery was literally half a block away from the hotel I was staying at, and even on the very same street, Spring Street.

Then through twitter I had confirmation from a fellow food blogger (thanks to the suz chef) who was in the Big Apple a week before that it was worth the queue to try out this food craze. So one morning, together with a few of my travel mates who were as curious as I was about the Cronuts, we rocked up at 7.00 am and to our horror, we encountered a queue that was a mile long.

Before I continue with this story, here are a few facts. What exactly is a Cronut? It is Dominique Ansel's creation and it is a cross between a croissant and a donut. It has the shape of a donut but with layers of flaky pastry (like a croissant).  Currently, Dominique Ansel has set a quota on how many cronuts an individual can buy. It is 2 per person and he only bakes 200 Cronuts a day. Simple maths says that if a person buys the max, only 100 people in the queue will be able to get Cronuts on any day.

My mates who joined me on day 1

So on that morning, we did a quick count and realised we had missed the cut by quite a lot. We called it quits and stopped by a nearby cafe for coffee. But at the same time I decided to ask the first few people in the queue what time they were there by. The first guy was there at 4.40 am, the 2nd who was a lady was there at 5.20 am. By the way, I think the first guy in line was wanting to offer me his Cronuts for a princely sum. I heard through the food grapevine that these guys were selling their bought Cronuts for 50 bucks! But I ignored his hints and moved on.

More than ever, I was determined to queue up and buy these Cronuts! I couldn't stand the fact that I hadn't got them yet. So on Saturday morning, I got there at 5.50 am and this time I was travel mateless! Yes, I was on my own because the others just didn't have in them to crawl out of bed at that time in the morning. Suffice to say, at that time in the morning I was about the 15th in line but it was nice to know for certain that I was definitely getting Cronuts that morning! Yay! 

A young couple arrived just after I did and we struck up a conversation and next thing you know it's almost 2 hours later. J and E were such a lovely young couple who was in NYC for the weekend. They were from Toronto and we are now connected via Instagram. So through our love of food and our willingness to queue up for Cronuts I made a lovely connection with 2 people who live on the other side of the world.

At 8.00 am, Dominique Ansel himself opened the main doors and welcomed a block of people at a time into his tiny bakery. I was so excited to finally get in and to actually meet the great patissier himself. He was so humble and thanked all of us for coming. I think there was a little rock star celebrity going on and as we queued up to place our orders, people were asking to take pictures with him. So I jumped on the bandwagon too! Why not! :-) So out came my camera and E was kind enough to take the pic! Yay!

The Cronuts were prepacked into a lovely gold box. Very upmarket and very exciting when I got to open up the box.