After the success of Black Star Pastry, founder Christopher Thé has sought to further pursue his passions — for sustainability, native ingredients and, of course, baking — with Hearthe, a bakery-cafe in Stanmore.
“I like being a small operator; you need to be able to do everything. I actually make a pretty good coffee too!” says the man who confesses he has gone from five cups a day to just the one. “Being a cafe owner, I just used to drink coffee all day. I drink a lot of decaf, and decaf has really come a long way in the last five to ten years. If you limit your coffee a little bit, you tend to enjoy it a bit more.”
And enjoyment — of coffee, of food — is what Hearthe is all about. “I think what we do here — baking or coffee — is a craft. It can take many, many years to get good at it but once you actually develop a mastery of what you’re doing, you unlock this joy of doing,” Chris says. “If you think of what we’re doing as kind of an art form, any kind of art form is a communication of meaning and ideas and tradition. You can communicate a whole lot. And I think when you’re on the creative side, your style tends to just find a natural ending place that kind of feels right to you. I think that’s important in having a signature style and signature look. There’s a whole lot going on though, and it has to taste good.”
As the success of Black Star Pastry attests, Christopher knows what tastes good; a selection of cakes and baked goods as well as freshly baked bread are always on offer at Hearthe, as well as “something interesting and fancy”. “After Black Star Pastry, I developed this interest and passion for ingredients, and plants, that grow in Australia — native Australian ingredients. It’s so fascinating. When you start to look at what grows here, it opens up your repertoire of what flavours and aromas and textures you can work with,” he explains. “Everything here should have something native in it, and we’re doing it in a way that shouldn’t be too gimmicky; we just put it in stuff that makes sense and hopefully by doing that, our customers, our local community, get used to eating Australian ingredients. That’s really been my thing for the last five years.”
To that end, Christopher has a garden at the back of Hearthe. “A lot of these ingredients we can grow and become self-sufficient. For example, the pig face goes in our salads; we’ve got it to a point where it’s self-sustaining and grows its self. We’ve also got cinnamon myrtle, saltbush, native thyme, native ginger — a lot of these native ingredients are still hard to get and quite expensive.”
The garden and native ingredients are also part of Christopher’s push for sustainability at a macro level. “I’m working on a sustainability certification developed for hospitality businesses globally called Food Made Good. I feel a lot of people talk sustainability but you need to be able to measure it as well.”
Fresh, native, tasty and made with love — for now, the measure of Hearthe’s success is the food it creates and the community it satisfies.
