Page 15 - foodservice magazine September 2018

DINING
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Butter poached prawns with apple, pearl senbei at Edition Coffee Roasters.
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THINK DIFFERENTLY. DANIEL JACKSON, THE MAN BEHIND SYDNEY’S EDITION COFFEE ROASTERS, LIVES, BREATHES AND ATTRIBUTES THE CULT CAFES’ SUCCESS TO THE MINDSET, AS YASMIN NEWMAN DISCOVERS.
When I arrive at Edition Coffee Roasters’ striking all-black abode in Sydney’s Haymarket – its second venue to date – I’m early. There are only a few signature miso and chocolate chip cookies left, so I order one under the pretence of photography and take a seat at one of the recessed tables known as horigotatsu. I’ve never seen one of these outside of a Japanese restaurant, let alone in a cafe.
“We like to do things differently,” says Daniel Jackson. He arrives a few minutes later, clad in matching black and with pulled-back long hair. He tells me he was an actor before getting into the coffee game (the flexible hours were great for castings) and as we talk for the next hour, I see how his knack for telling stories and crafting characters transcends his popular cafes.
Edition One in Darlinghurst opened late 2014. By early 2015,
it was awarded Time Out Sydney’s Best Cafe and also received a five- star rating – a score formerly achieved only by restaurants. When the cool, crisp venue’s styling and unique brand of fine dining- inspired cafe fare hit the city, it felt timely and yet by chance – an overnight success magically capturing the zeitgeist. But any actor (or restaurateur for that matter) will tell you there’s no such thing. Years of honing precede it.
Jackson pulled his first coffee back in 2008, briefly co-owned a cafe in ‘09, then ran his first solo venture, Room 10, from late 2010. Set in a dodgy thoroughfare between Kings Cross and Potts Point, the tiny, 28-square-metre space was one of Sydney’s first laneway cafes and won top gongs two consecutive years. Then he sold up to go travelling. “I found it draining running such a small and busy cafe,” Jackson concedes. “There was no space for stock and everyone was always on top of each other. It was very intense.”
He was kicking back in Edinburgh when he received a call from a mate and property developer. “There’s this corner spot between Surry Hills, Potts Point and the city and no one has ever made a good crack of a cafe in the area,” Jackson recalls him saying. With his finger on the pulse, he signed on, and his brother Corie Sutherland, who’d been living in Japan, put his hand up too.
When they got back, home was different. “The industry in Australia was all the same, especially after what we’d seen overseas.” Recycled, industrial and rustic dominated the visual aesthetic and food was all avo on toast and baked eggs. “It was as if Sydney had got stuck in this rut of someone seeing something done well in one suburb and carbon copying it to another,” explains Jackson. “No one was breaking boundaries or doing something different.”