What do you get when you combine a pizzeria, gelateria, delicatessen and a coffee bar under one roof? The Coffee Warehouse Café and Deli.
Sprawled across around 2000 square meters, the specialty coffee outlet saw 20,000 people walk through the doors in the first four weeks of opening.
The Coffee Warehouse is a family owned and operated business with third generation coffee roasters. Giuseppe Di Stefano has worked as a coffee roaster all his life and brought his craft from Italy to Sydney. Giuseppe’s son, Nick, is Managing Director of the new venue and Primo Products.
Having never operated a café before, Nick says what they have established is quite spectacular.
“It’s something different that hasn’t been put together on this scale before,” he says. “We wanted to have it all, offer the full experience, show off what we can do and allow people to see every aspect of how we do it.”
Wide glass panels surround the $1.2 million custom-made coffee roaster, in an open display for customers to view everyday roasting operations. The machine is a fully automised Brambati roaster that can produce 250 kilograms of coffee an hour. The roaster can even transport the roasted beans to the café via the conveyor belt for baristas to grind fresh on demand.
“We’ve moved from traditional coffee roasters to fully-automated systems and the consistency of the product is so much greater and our margin of error is quite minute,” Nick says.
The Coffee Warehouse serves Caffé Di Stefano’s signature label coffee across five premium blends including Dolce, a Central and South America blend; Forte, offering a rich dark cocoa notes; Maestro, South America and East Asia beans with a ‘snappy twinge’ as well as decaffeinated coffee. Customers can watch head barista, salvatore Magro, pour his famous swan latte art.
Other brewing methods available include siphon, Japanese cold drip and filter coffee.
“It’s amazing how everyone has got into the café scene and are experimenting more and more,” Nick says.
The Coffee Warehouse runs weekly coffee tutorials where customers can visit the massive coffee roaster, develop their own coffee blend and learn how to make the perfect cup of coffee from a trained barista.
Suggested food favourites are the famous whole-grill based and gluten free pizza. And to finish it off, a chocolate and nutella gelato.