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If you meet Diogo Ferreira, baker and owner of Tuga Pastries, Tuga x Village and their sister cafe in Alexandria, expect a whirlwind of passionate conversation about food, family, his Portuguese ancestry and the seaside village suburb of Clovelly.

Even on his honeymoon in Europe this year, Ferreira was testing, tasting and researching food, produce and cooking techniques to bring home.

“Everywhere, including the flight back, I was constantly writing down ideas and thoughts and looking and trying and putting on 10 kilos,” he says. “The plane literally landed and I was hounding everyone going, ‘We’re doing a new menu, new drinks, new pastries, new Christmas, everything’.”

Ferreira’s passion has inspired Tuga x Village, a buzzing and dapper cafe with mosaic tile floors, banquette, table and outdoor seating, white brick walls and cork table tops and counter fronts. Renamed and fresh from renovations, it is a reworking of Ferreira’s Village on Cloey, the cafe he has run here for seven years, just a few doors down from his counter-only Tuga bakery.

It also has a new summer menu and the best advice is to order something you may not have heard of.

Start with pasteis de bacalhau, Portuguese cod fish croquettes served with mint and cucumber yoghurt, Tuga’s mango chutney, bountiful salad greens and chilli oil. Crispy, tubby and fleshy, they are ethereally good. Customers swear by the egg and bacon roll, and fried eggs served with pork lard, but add the torricados sardinha, Portuguese sardine pâte with fried potato, pickled onion, capsicum salsa verde and Portuguese-style sourdough, pao alentejano, from southern Portugal in the Alentejo region.

The sourdough, which Ferreira began baking a year ago, also comes seeded, white or rosemary and olive, but look out for his bolo do caco, slightly sweet potato buns originally from the Portuguese island of Madeira.

Other menu highlights include hamburguer de salmao e choco, a grilled salmon and squid patty with lemon mayo and radish and seaweed salad; and the porco, Portuguese marinated pork with yoghurt and chimichurri on a bolo de caco.

Tuga’s drinks, all made from scratch, are led by four homemade sodas. Order the lemon, lime and bitters with homemade lemon-lime syrup, and the Tuga ginger ale, a bitey ginger syrup mixed with lemon and lime juice and sparkling water.

Outside, people queue for pastries: swirly almond croissants, twisty orange cardamon tarts, savoury danishes stippled with cheese, glistening pain Suisse with custard and chocolate chips.

Countless pastel de nata accompany dark brown hazelnut pain Suisse, heady with chocolate, frangipane, Nutella and chopped hazelnuts, and bola de berlim, sugar-rolled, chocolate-hued Portuguese doughnuts that explode with a sweet eggy filling.

Growing up, Ferreira, who has lived in Clovelly for nearly 20 years, got a first-hand view of baking and food production as his mother, Maria Lucia, and late father, Agostinho “Gus” Ferreira, ran bakeries and cafes in Sydney after emigrating from Portugal in 1985. Beginning at Honeymoon bakery in Petersham, they ran Fleur De Lys in Bondi, and then a factory space in Buckley Street, Marrickville, that, among other baked goods, made 3000 hand-pressed pasteis de nata a day.

Ferreira followed the family baking tradition after some years in hospitality by trialling his late father’s recipes.

“Dad never wanted to teach me because he knew how difficult such a business was,” he says. “When my parents migrated here, they were from villages in the country, no education. It was a hard life for them.

“It is hard, but I now revisit those villages and they’re broken or fallen apart, or no one lives there. I can see why he thought, ‘Stay away from kitchens’. But I didn’t want that to hold me back.”

Next year, Ferreira will return to the Buckley Street building to open a three-storey Tuga headquarters with a rooftop garden, large bakery space, shop and dining areas, inspired by Lisbon’s Time Out shopping and restaurant market. “It’s taken a long time but it’s finally happening,” he says.