Lune Croissanterie
After years of anticipation and rumours swirling thick and fast like a well-whisked crème pâtissière, Melbourne’s Lune Croissanterie has announced it expects to open its Sydney flagship in 2024 — and in an unanticipated location.
The Lune Sydney flagship venue was originally slated to open in a Darlinghurst location, but the team has since announced it has secured a new site in Rosebery “due to unforeseen delays in Darlinghurst”. “We’ve shifted to a new location in order to keep our plans on track and honour our commitment to bring the Lune experience to Sydney in 2024,” confirms Lune founder Kate Reid.
Reid, who co-owns Lune with restaurateur Nathan Toleman and her brother Cameron Reid, envisages that the Lune Sydney flagship will open by the end of this year. It’s been a long road to get here, with the Gourmet Traveller first covering the news in 2020. But building site delays and relocation aside, the long lead time has been necessary – there’s staff to recruit, blueprints to approve, and there’s a big question mark over how to maintain the quality of those croissants. It’s all part of ensuring the Lune’s je ne sais quoi translates over the state border. “This is not an outpost store – we’re bringing the Lune experience to Sydney,” she says.
Reid has been determined to find the perfect venue that speaks true to the business she started 12 years ago. It’s a golden lesson learnt from in Paris while training at Du Pain et des Idées, a small bakery in the 10th arrondissement run by award-winning baker Christophe Vasseur. “Christophe said to me: ‘You can all the best ideas, but until you find the right site, you can’t open a business.'”
A second Lune Sydney site is also slated to open at Metro Martin Place, which comes as good news for Sydney suits and city workers. It is expected to open concurrently with the new CBD precinct.
The pastry powerhouse is renowned for two things: exquisitely engineered croissants, and early-morning queues. They are not mutually exclusive. The croissants, perfected by Reid, have a crisp shell that shatters beautifully on impact in the mouth; the feathery folds of pastry within are buttery without being bready.
The lines formed soon after Lune opened in its original shopfront in Melbourne’s Elwood in 2012; they only persisted after The New York Times described the classic beurre croissant as perhaps “the finest you will find anywhere in the world”.
Reid has a forensic approach to producing the pastries – the temperature of every ingredient is measured and recorded, and the resting times are adjusted according to those variables – which belies her former career as a designer for Formula One race cars.
The last time her croissants were spotted in Sydney was at the Lune x Koko Black pop-up in 2023. Now (finally) Sydney will soon be home to not one but two permanent Lune Croissanterie sites.
“We’ve grown a lot since opening in a tiny production kitchen in Elwood, and we’ve actually gotten better as we’ve gotten bigger,” she says. “It’s rare for a business to not just maintain, but also to improve, its quality. It’s very exciting.”
