The lobby of a well-known Hobart office building has received a facelift with a vibrant new cafe
Work lunches don’t need to be boring, with a new cafe in Hobart’s CBD offering an enticing array of food and drink to keep city office workers well-fuelled, writes Alix Davis.
TasWeekend
Don't miss out on the headlines from TasWeekend. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Back at the start of my career, when I worked in an office, I was a big fan of bringing my own lunch.
Not only because I was a young, poorly paid magazine fact-checker, but also because I wasn’t a big fan of the very limited options offered by the lobby coffee shop in our building that was the only food outlet in the immediate area.
That is certainly not the case if you’re lucky enough to work in the Land Titles Office on Macquarie St – or Lands Building as it is more commonly known.
The new lobby cafe, appropriately called Lobby, offers an enticing array of food and drink to keep city office workers well-fuelled from the morning coffee run to afternoon tea time.
We dropped in for a late midweek lunch and were happy to grab a table in the bright and airy space as some other lunch stragglers came by for takeaways or to sit down.
There’s a clean, Scandi-inspired vibe to the space and attention has been given to stylish leather-bound menus and coasters. Table service is swift and efficient and cutlery is brought ahead of our meals on chic timber trays.
It’s all a very far cry from my youthful office lunch experiences (three-day-old tabouli is never a good choice!).
The menu offers both breakfast and lunch options and, while breakfast sounds great (an egg
sandwich of chilli chive scrambled egg with cheese, caramelised onions and chill mayo on a
homemade milk bun ($15), with added housemade corned beef (+$7)? Yes, please!), it’s definitely lunchtime for us.
I order the chilli pork rice ($22) and am happy to be served a neat omelette studded with chilli-miso pork mince and sliced shallots, that’s draped over a mound of perfectly cooked rice.
A drizzle of chilli oil and some crispy-fried shallots add colour and texture and this feels like a delicious variation on the omurice dishes that I’ve eaten in a few cafes about town lately.
It’s full of flavour and certainly makes for a satisfying lunch.
Our next dish is another one that has been popping up all over Hobart lately (and I am not complaining!) – a Reuben sandwich ($18). Here it’s made with a tight-crumb sourdough that has been baked on-site, and the thickly sliced corned beef has also been made in-house.
Lightly pickled cucumbers and caraway seed-speckled sauerkraut adds a delicious tang to the softer flavours of Swiss cheese and Russian dressing. The corned beef is tender and makes me want to rush home and make my own batch of this childhood favourite.
Halloumi is always a favourite (who doesn’t love squeaky cheese?) and this stack ($21) of goodness includes a slice of that fabulous sourdough, two perfectly poached eggs, a handful of fresh rocket, avo and a punchy pesto. It’s fresh and feels like a healthy way to power up for an afternoon in the office.
One of the real drawcards at Lobby is the coffee. Owner Thao Kieu has a background in five-star hotels and says he learned a lot about coffee from a mentor there. Their house beans are
Stitch Coffee (his mentor’s company in Sydney), and each week they also feature beans from a micro-roaster in Hobart or around Australia.
“We really want to showcase what small roasters are doing,” says Thao, who owns Lobby with his partner Thea Hoang.
The cafe opened in mid-March after a plumbing hiccup in February and Thao says much of the credit goes to their head chef Sylvia Santoso.
She’s the one responsible for the sourdough (and all the other cakes and treats), which actually came about after a local supplier was unable to deliver one day.
The team realised that they’d be better off making their bread themselves and Sylvia, who used to own a bakery in Indonesia, came to the rescue.
Whether you need a perfectly crafted coffee, a beautifully baked piece of cake or a lunch that will get you through an afternoon of meetings that could have been an email, Lobby has something that will hit the spot just right.
LOBBY
134 Macquarie St, Hobart
Opening hours: Mon-Fri, 7am – 4pm (kitchen closes at 2.30pm)
ON THE MENU
Chilli pork rice, $22; Reuben, $18; halloumi stack, $21; fibrelicious smoothie, $10; carrot cake, $6.
Is this the sweetest foodie opening of the year?
This recently opened family-friendly Northern cafe makes a sweet new addition to this business’s growing empire
Warning: This hobby could become an obsession
A thriving Tassie festival will celebrate our beekeepers and world-renowned honey industry while highlighting dangers of introduced pests to the small but mighty heroes of our gardens and farms.