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Yes, there’s a $35 coffee at ONA Sydney’s new Marrickville cafe. And yes, there are slick sushi-style counters dedicated to espresso, filter or caffeinated mocktails – a designer look that contrasts with ONA’s previous set-up on Marrickville Road.

If you know about the roaster’s founder, Sasa Sestic, this temple-to-coffee vibe is very on-brand. He went from being Australia’s youngest handball player at Sydney’s 2000 Olympic Games to a Canberra cafe owner selling flat whites, despite having zero espresso-making experience.

He entered his first coffee competition in 2008 (“He wasn’t a very good performer and his shirts were even worse,” Sestic’s colleague says in the documentary The Coffee Man) and became the World Barista Champion in 2015, despite being so sick he couldn’t even walk before the semi-final.

So yes, his Sydney flagship cafe is capital-S Serious about caffeinated brews. But if you don’t know your typica from your pacamara or your washed from your anaerobic process (I barely do), you can still enjoy ONA.

Its potato rosti, for instance, is all crisp waves and golden coils: the experience is like joyfully demolishing a brick of instant noodles. My ears are still registering the deep sound of that rosti crunch. It’s truly one of Sydney’s best potato dishes. “We sell out of rostis every weekend,” says venue manager Bora Jin. So schedule your visit (or set your alarm) accordingly.

Head chef Roger Peeters remixes cafe staples in refreshing ways. Tteokbokki French toast is inspired by sous-chef Sujin Jeong’s home cooking: the spicy tteokbokki (Korean rice cakes) are sweetened with maple syrup, but the direction is deeply savoury (crushed nuts, fried onions, chilli-red drizzles of gochujang sauce) rather than the dessert-like decadence of conventional French toast.

Coffee gets splashed on the menu, too. The beef roll gets its flavour hit from meat braised in the cafe’s batch brew for 16 hours, while the Maple espresso adds earthy intensity to the caramelised onion and coffee relish (it’s one of many excellent sides you’ll find here).

If you don’t know your typica from your pacamara or your washed from your anaerobic process, you can still enjoy ONA.

And that $35 coffee? Well, the pricetag for the Nirvana from Finca Deborah comes from its steep Panama location. “When a coffee tree is grown in a very high elevation, it has to decide between surviving or yielding more fruit,” says Jin. The small amount it produces contains greater sweetness, depth and complexity, she says, “just like wine”.

And like chardonnay or champagne, your expectations can amp up when presented with a more expensive option. Surely a $35 coffee will be so stunning, it’ll completely reorder my brain, or feel like a symphonic take-off? But the reality is that it depends on your own history.

Maybe if I regularly ingested cups of nitrogen macerated natural Geisha, the Nirvana would be a revelation – but it’s rather understated to my inexpert tastebuds. It reminds me of a difficult book that requires you to constantly re-read its pages, because you don’t fully get what’s going on.

The coffee cocktails at ONA, however, are an instant joy that don’t require decoding. There’s the citrus-fragrant Arashi mule that Jin created (tonic water spiked with Finca Arashi Espresso, fruity with Korean peach cheong and adorned with frozen orange-peel roses she carefully shapes) and the knockout Geisha Sour by head barista Jim Lin. Caffeinated with Ethiopia Geisha Village Lot #102 Espresso, it fizzes with many reviving flavours (lychee syrup, bergamot-bright Earl Grey tea and the cane sugar hit of panela). It’s worth constantly reordering, regardless of the depths of your coffee intel.

Specialty coffee has many faces in Sydney: I’ve seen kids joyfully run around the Probat roaster at Stanmore’s Brighter, for instance, which takes a lo-fi, beginner-friendly and inclusive approach to highlighting the individual farmers behind your cup.

ONA Sydney leans into the technical side (they really love to tell you about carbonic maceration), and there are theatrical pours involving chilled
rocks and elaborate brewing gadgets.

I won’t lie, there are times at ONA Sydney when I feel like I’m failing a test, but Jin says not to be intimidated. “I hope people feel more comfortable to start a conversation with us,” she says. “Because not knowing is OK.”

And for non-coffee-geeks, there’s always potato rosti and the cleverly crafted caffeinated mocktails.