The East Kitchen

Good bakeries are very good things to find, particularly if they are near one's place of employment and one is not very good at making lunch for oneself on weekday mornings. The bakery in the Student Union building at the ANU, for example, provided us with reasonable sustenance (try the garlic butter scrolls) for not much money when we needed it. Perhaps, at the other end of the sophistication spectrum, we have also enjoyed Silo and Cornucopia's breads and other goodies from time to time (when we are game enough to brave their eternal busyness).

Recently however we discovered that The East Kitchen in Dickson, which appears to be a fairly standard Chinese restaurant by night, also offers self-service Chinese bakery food at lunchtime on Tuesdays and Fridays. All your glazed, Chinese-style, white-bread bun favourites are there, including the ubiquitous BBQ pork bun. The red bean paste variant isn't that flash (the paste is too gluggy), but we do like the coconut and custard filled ones. While certainly not the best bakery experience you're likely to have - although you do get to play with tongs - it is cheap and fairly yummy for a quick lunch. It's next to Sfoglia.