Hector's Bakery in Richmond Is Added to The Hot List
The Hot List is the definitive guide to Melbourne’s most essential food and drink experiences, updated weekly. Learn more.
• Added: Hector’s Bakery
• Most trending restaurant: Suze
• Most trending bar: Slowpoke
• Most trending cafe: Dua
It was mid-2017. Despacito was blaring out of every speaker, Zika was the virus everyone was scared of and Netflix’s House of Cards was both acclaimed and unproblematic.
Stay in the know with our free newsletter. The latest restaurants, must-see exhibitions, style trends, travel spots and more – curated by those who know.
I was still at uni and had only been writing for Broadsheet for a few months. While better and more experienced writers were covering big restaurant openings – Kisume, Etta, and Osteria Ilaria were that year’s headliners – I was sent to write about a tiny new sandwich shop in the backstreets of Richmond.
The hook was that its owners all came from a fine-dining background (which used to be radical). Back then, when chefs wanted a better work-life balance, they’d open a brunch spot. Dishes like Seven Seeds’ chipotle waffle benedict, The Kettle Black’s granola bowls, and Code Black’s green eggs and ham ruled the daytime roost. Not sandwiches.
“We’re trying to keep it super simple and steer away from the sort of place that Melbourne seems to produce four of a day,” Hector’s Deli’s co-owner Dom Wilton said at the time. “We’re not really doing smashed avocado or putting flowers on anything – just sandwiches”.
I wrote it, we published, and what was supposed to be a standard new opening story became one of our most popular articles of the year. Hector’s Deli had tapped into something. The rest is Melbourne sandwich history.
Hector’s Deli didn’t invent the fine-dining-chefs-do-sandwiches thing, or the So-and-so’s Deli naming format, or even chicken schnitzel sandwiches so big they beg to be photographed, but it did masterfully pull them all together. Last year, when we asked whether Melbourne had reached peak sandwich, it became obvious that Hector’s was the base of the carby mountain. And Hector’s can take a lot of credit for the fact that you can now find cracking sandwich shops just about anywhere in Melbourne.
With locations in South Melbourne, Fitzroy and the CBD, it’s now a chain with big ambitions. And it was starting to face a challenge that every scaling food business runs into eventually – maintaining consistent quality across every branch of the tree. The team has come up with a very Hector’s Deli solution to that problem.
Instead of doing a classic behind-closed-doors central production kitchen, last week, the team opened Hector’s Bakery. It brings all of the chain’s baking, fermentation and butchering in-house, and puts it on proud, open display – like a less sci-fi version of the famous Lune cube.
It also functions as the biggest Hector’s Deli yet: a supersized flagship for the rest of the fleet to follow. All of the classic sangas that gave Hector’s its sandwich supremacy are here, plus doughnuts, pastries, coffee, soft-serve and more.
Hector’s Deli was always going to be Hot-Listed. But we’ve been holding out for Hector’s Bakery. And it doesn’t disappoint. It’s a celebration of the eight years it took to get to this point and sets Hector’s up to continue its ongoing expansion – wherever it goes next.
Well, this sucks. Last year Broadsheet investigated Australia’s struggling craft beer industry. Independent names like Wayward, Hawkers, Akasha were going into voluntary administration, and plenty of smaller labels were doing it tough, too. And things have sadly gone from bad to worse. Deeds Brewing in Glen Iris closed just under two weeks ago. Was it the pandemic? The beer excise? The cost-of-living crisis? Probably all of the above.
The latest casualty hurts, and it’s a removal from the Hot List we didn’t want to make. Molly Rose, one of Melbourne’s most consistently innovative and delicious breweries, which in recent years had added fantastic food and distilling to its operation, has appointed the liquidators. Its final day of trade was last Sunday (March 30), and owner Nic Sandery is trying to find a path forward to restructuring and reopening Molly Rose someday. With these things, you never know. But Melbourne’s beer scene just got a little smaller – and a lot less interesting.
www.broadsheet.com.au/hotlist/melbourne
The Hot List is proudly sponsored by Square.
