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The most popular menu item at Azuki, a Japanese artisan bakery on a curl of residential road 10 minutes from Wolli Creek railway station, is the curry pan. Every second customer buys one.

They may take a tray and a pair of tongs and look inside the wooden window cabinets to choose an egg sandwich on soft, fat, white slices of shokupan, or a tartar fish burger, its creamy sauce fringing golden segments of crisped fillet inside a sesame seed-topped roll.

They may reflect on the five-tier glass cake cabinet where pearly white fluffy cheesecake slices resemble Sydney Opera House sails; where creamy vanilla puddings glow like headlights; custard puffs with biscuit lids barely contain their custard fillings; and chestnut Mont Blanc tarts are sculpted mini almond and cream sculpted turrets.

But, they always get a curry pan as well.

One man, on this spring morning, runs from his just-parked car, orders five curry pans and races back. His urgency for the crunchy, chewy bun filled with warm beef curry, is normal for Azuki’s owner and chef, Shun Hashimoto.

“Everybody loves them,” he says. “They are popular in Japan and that does not change here.”

Hashimoto runs two Azuki bakeries. The first on Enmore Road in Newtown, open for seven years, and this new, bigger second bakery in Wolli Creek, inspired by demand, customer requests and the need for a bigger kitchen.

“A lot of customers would drive to Newtown to get their orders,” he says. “This bakery helps with that. It also increases production, gives us more tables for dining in and allows more variety.”

Many of the cakes, sandwiches, savoury pies, rolls and pans are familiar to the Enmore Road bakery but Hashimoto says the Wolli Creek menu has 50 per cent more.

There is also a new dine-in menu. Anything can be eaten at the tables – from the filling yakisoba pan with stir-fried noodle and vegetable croquette to the black and white sesame seed-speckled azuki doughnut, a soft, chewy dream filled with red bean paste-encased mochi balls.

The new eat-in options include a brulee French toast featuring an elegant mountain of caramelised shokupan with strawberries and dinky jugs of yuzu and maple syrup.

It’s knock-out sibling is the creamy mocha ebi toastie. This can be ordered at any time of the day and it is something else to breakfast upon, with three layers of shokupan topped with broccoli, prawns, mochi cubes and grilled bechamel.

Pour on the accompanying miso yuzu sauce and it’s a knock-your-socks-off fiesta of cheesy, citrusy, creamy seafood and vegetable magnificence. Order a curry pan by all means but eat this first.

Drink-wise the menu stretches from coffee and tea to matcha and original cold sodas.

Cold drink recommendations include the matcha ichigo with coconut jelly, which combines the nutty grassy green tea flavour with strawberry syrup, and the ume lychee soda, mixing sour plum and sweet lychee flesh. Fragrant and fresh, it’s like a big drink of spring.

Hashimoto also recommends a hojicha latte, hot or iced. Rather than matcha’s young tea leaves, this drink uses mature tea leaves which are roasted over charcoal before being ground. Smoky, with a fuller taste than matcha, it is a delightful hot drink to dwell on.

“I want to say one thing,” Hashimoto says, standing in the doorway of the bakery. “Our mission is to introduce anything good about Japanese culture.

“It’s not only about the food. For example, service. In Japan, if you go to any bakeries or small shops, where people are working $10 to $12 per hour, they do a really, really good service.

“It’s because it’s very common and natural for us to communicate with customers, to do a better service with a good smile. I want to show that here. It just happens to be bakeries that I’m using to complete that mission.”

And then Hashimoto smiles, shakes hands and turns to a customer pondering a wasabi pork katsu sandwich in the cabinet.

“Will it be too much?” the customer says about the nostril-storming condiment lacing the crisp-edged meat.

“Oh no,” Hashimoto says. “It is just enough. I promise it is delicious.”