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.

Urambi Hills Bakery

One things we've noticed in passing recently is small businesses where older owner-operators don't seem to be able to let go or acknowledge change - in the sense of an apparent generalised hostility to any potential customers under the age of 50 or so. We grant that certain characteristics of certain cohorts of young people, in certain circumstances, are worthy of some disdain. However, if you are willing to categorically assume the worst about all young people, some self-examination, at the very least, is surely in order?

After coming across a couple such businesses in the space of a morning the other day it was refreshing to find the Urambi Hills Bakery on Altree Street in Phillip (i.e. the Woden Town Centre area). Instead of the embittered aged, we came across two teenagers being teenagers while happening to run, or at least front for, an OK sort of a bakery in the light industrial bit of Woden across Hindmarsh Drive. To eat we had a couple of antipasto pastries, which although perhaps not being Silo-class goodies, were nonetheless cheap ($3 each), and delicious. During their consumption we had the chance to read The Daily Telegraph (something we don't do everyday) left on the table by the previous customer, while two young men came independently of one another, flirted with the aforementioned teenagers, and then departed to sell cars and bicycles respectively. Cake paraphernalia, and signage about organic flour suggested that these were also specialities of the place, along with generally friendly, unaccusing service. Probably not worth a trip, but maybe a good option if you're nearby.