The Thousands

Spare a thought for those who don’t drink coffee. Cowering on the outer fringe, while we’re all huddling around the sacred beverage, murmuring about roasting technique and extraction times. They must feel like they’re missing a chromosome.

For the rest of us, the insanity continues. Cafes have been roasting beans in-house for awhile now, but things have quickly moved from nouveaux to the norm. Double Roasters, in the Inner-West enclave of Paddington-of-the-70s Marrickville, is the latest addition to the RIY community (that’s ‘Roast It Yourself’ – a term I’ve just coined).

It’s a cute industrial-meets-French country space looking across the flow of Victoria Road traffic to little Wicks Park. The coffee’s good and service is perfectly, unobtrusively efficient. There’s a small menu of things on toast and sandwiches (including gluten-free), plated with concentric circles of sticky balsamic straight out of the squeezy bottles of 1998. So are the prices – most items hover around the $7 mark. And there are Tea Craft teas and fresh juices for the fringe dwellers.