Cubic’s new Edward Street cafe pairs specialty coffee with Japanese-inspired treats
One of Brisbane CBD’s favourite coffee spots has doubled up. Cubic’s new Edward Street venue introduces Japanese-French pastries, shokupan toasties and a suite of coffee technologies rarely seen in Brisbane. Take a peek …
Richard Barthes never thought he’d expand Cubic. His George Street coffee spot, which has operated since early 2021, has cemented itself as one of the best caffeination stations in its pocket of the inner city. And while popular beyond doubt, the urge to double up never took hold.
“Some operators, they want multiple sites – they’ve got six, seven, eight but that’s not really me,” explains Richard. “I like having one spot and just running it and doing well out of it.”
But sometimes, life delivers an opportunity that’s too hard to ignore. In this instance, it was a vacant site outside 60 Ann Street – a slender, street-side cafe space in an on-the-rise part of the CBD near venues like The French Exit, San Telmo and Golden Avenue.
It had room for a few tables, but it was mostly geared towards takeaway. It also boasted design elements that were closely reminiscent of Cubic’s George Street digs. To Richard, it had everything he would have hoped for in a potential expansion site.
“The timing was right,” Richard tells us. “The other shop was humming, with a good team in place and under management, so I felt like if I was ever to expand, this was probably the right timing.”
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Cubic Edward Street opened in late June, wasting little time endearing itself to passers-by. For this outpost, Richard has elected to do some things differently. For one, the spatial limitations of the site have meant changing Cubic’s approach to food. Where George Street specialises in focaccias, Edward Street’s eats involve a different style of baking.
Richard’s wife and business partner Akiko has developed a new pastry range for the locale, with an offering encompassing house-made shokupan-style brioche (topped with avocado, furikake and microgreens, or as a toastie with ham, cheese and bechamel sauce), canneles, financiers, cookies and other baked goods produced fresh throughout the day.
“I really wanted to use my wife’s Japanese influence,” says Richard. “She came up with the recipes.
“There aren’t many patisseries or bakeries in the city that are really doing these items. They are traditionally French pastries, but ones that you find very commonly in Japan. That mix is really good … I think it’s a very pure representation of who we are as owners of the business.”
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When it comes to coffee, Cubic isn’t straying too far away from what it does best. Richard has selected a chocolatey blend from Bear Bones as Cubic’s house pour, as well as a rotating range of single-origin coffees from a murderers’ row of local specialty roasters (think Passport, Almanac, Black Mass and ‘Feind) and a few national heavyweights.
The coffee bar is also equipped with four free-pour batch taps, which dispense single-origin batch brews, oat matcha on tap, fruit-forward cold brews topped with dairy-free cold foams and one tap for pre-batched espresso – the latter a topic that has spurred significant debate in the national coffee scene.
Cafes like Project Zero in Melbourne have pushed pre-batched espresso to the forefront of their operations, touting its benefits as a productivity enhancer, dispensing coffee at high volume without a decrease in quality – a boon in an era where hospitality margins are razor-thin.
“Ever since opening George Street, we’ve always tried to find a way to service people quicker, with better quality,” says Richard.
“For the last few years, I’ve been doing a lot of research into what types of equipment we could bring in to streamline the process. Before I went forward with this, we did a whole bunch of blind tastings. Nine times out of ten, the pre-batch comes out on top because it’s smoother. When you pre-batch 20 shots into one vessel, they even out in terms of flavour.”
While Cubic Edward Street is only running with one pre-batched espresso tap, Richard can see the benefits. That being said, he also acknowledges the pitfalls that technology can bring.
“My fear, though, is this gets adopted and then it becomes lazy and people will not care about the quality and it’ll just be on tap, almost like instant,” says Richard. “We have to be careful with specialty – it has to be top-notch, really good quality coffee, well extracted and used for the right purposes.”
For now, Richard is content to forge a new community around Cubic Edward Street. Though this quadrant isn’t short on top coffee spots, Richard isn’t operating with a competitive mindset.
“For us, it’s not really trying to compete with the other guys. We’re creating our own little pocket in this area of the city,” Richard says. “There’s a lot of development around here, a lot of things happening. It is a good spot to be in.”
For operating hours and other details, head to The Directory.
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