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If you stand outside Wholegreen Bakery & Cafe in Alexandria, the sun streaming on your back before a window lined with seeded sourdough loaves, fresh raspberry tarts, velvety caramel-hued tiramisu slices and chicken and beef pies with flaky lids of golden puff pastry, it’s possible the last thing on your mind is gluten-free.

Nothing looks “gluten-free”. Nothing suggests a poor imitation of food commonly made with wheat, rye or barley products. Nothing seems apologetic or falling apart or just generally sad, as was the case historically with items prepared to people diagnosed with coeliac disease, non-coeliac gluten sensitivity, allergies or irritable bowel syndrome.

Everything at this gluten-free bakery-cafe thrums with a come-hither marvellousness. Wholegreen Bakery’s Alexandria bakery and cafe, founder Cherie Lyden’s third Wholegreen outlet with counterparts in Waverley and Sydney’s CBD, is a year-and-a-half old.

Fronting the bakery’s factory headquarters, it’s a hole-in-the-wall cafe stacked with gluten-free loaves, buns, baguettes, croissants, tarts, slices, pies, quiches, sausage rolls, biscuits and toasted sandwiches.

In a no-through road, and surrounded by light industry factories, it has outdoor seating on umbrella-shaded wooden bench tables, strong Colombian Connection coffee, tea and cold drinks.

The thing to remember here is to pounce.

Wholegreen Bakery customers, long impassioned by the variety of products, move like panthers.

One minute you’re admiring yeasted sourdough fruit loaves, dusty with white rice flour and studded with figs and raisins, or bronze-peaked lemon meringue tarts, sunshine-yellow Portuguese custard tarts or pert passionfruit tea cakes with lime and mint icing.

The next, they’re gone, off and down the road under the arms of people who knew they had to get in quick.

It pays to snaffle beautifully flaky cornflower petal-speckled peach danishes or pillowy, orb-like sourdough and brioche buns, rich, sesame seed-flecked pork and fennel sausage rolls or slow-cooked grass-fed beef pies as soon as you see them.

That pie, a 2023 Bronze Medal winner at the Sydney Royal Fine Food Show, has a buttery shortcrust base holding onion, sauteed carrots and soft beef chunks in very fine gravy topped with a perfect puff pastry lid.

Equally lovely is the free-range chicken, mushroom and leek pie, its poached thigh meat, aromatic with oregano, sealed in yet more excellent pastry.

You can marvel at this being gluten-free, but the taste’s the thing.

For anyone who has coeliac disease or is gluten-intolerant, eating these pies – or a roast vegetable frittata slice, a ham, cheese and Dijon mustard toasted sandwich or the dark chocolate and raspberry brownie – is a wholly relieving and/or life-saving experience.

Lyden, a trained nutritionist, and brand ambassador for Coeliac Australia, was inspired to create gluten-free baked goods after her daughter, Lucia, who works behind the counter, was diagnosed with the coeliac disease as a young child.

“I also got diagnosed in my 40s,” Lyden says.

“I wanted to create really delicious food, beautiful sourdough breads and pastries that Lucia would never get to try normally, because I didn’t want her to miss out on anything.

“I wanted her to live a gluten-free life fearlessly.”

Earlier this year, Lyden oversaw the Cardboard Cake, a cunning one-off collaboration with advertising agency The Hallway that upended every jibe about gluten-free food tasting like cardboard.

Made with chocolate, butterscotch and espresso, and using a bespoke baking tray to imitate cardboard’s corrugations, it magicked creamy, wafery coffee-cocoa sweetness with the giddy lark of apparently biting into a brown packaging box.

Dear Wholegrain Bakery, please bring this stout, melty undulating triumph back.

Lyden says one of the most rewarding things about founding and developing Wholegreen Bakery food and cafes is watching children with coeliac disease or gluten intolerance eyeing the baked goods with the knowledge they can eat it all.

“It’s more than a bakery,” Lyden says. “It’s a community.

“People can eat with confidence, there’s no cross-contamination and we are Coeliac Australia accredited.”

She says a large part of her customer base is people who don’t need to eat gluten-free food.

“There’s no judging here, no eye rolling, no being told it’s a fad,” she says.

“From the very beginning, I’ve just wanted people to come and enjoy food.”