We’re back with The Dish, and this month we have a partner story that’s come halfway around the globe to land right on our doorstep here in Canberra.
But before we get to the new cafe in Parkes, our story begins in Southern California with a teenage Taylor Wright.
The pastry calling came early to Taylor and with a passion for baking and an entrepreneurial spirit, Taylor started selling baked goods at her local farmers markets. This teenage pastry dream took Taylor from New York to Spain and full circle back to Southern California.
And then came love and as many Australians can attest, the charm of a great Aussie bloke is hard to resist and Taylor found herself married to an Australian and living in Canberra and the dream of Catbird was born.
With that dream came a year long exploration to create the perfect menu for the soon to be cafe. The results are fresh, delicious, satisfying and inspired by Southern California.
The breakfast burritos are the cornerstone of the menu and these are accompanied by granola bowls, mushroom toast, American brekky burgers and the most gorgeous French toast with raspberry curd, swirled chocolate meringue and fresh orange.
The perfect menu is nothing without the perfect venue and Taylor set her design team the task of morphing the new premises under the Griffin building into “industrial beachy Californian mid-century modern library chic”. Despite the brief being deemed “not a real thing” by the design team, in Taylor’s words “they knocked it out of the park”.
Just when Taylor thought she’d settled on the perfect menu, in came the social media trend, the Crookie. Not one to be outdone by Tik Tok or the French chef who creates the Crookie, Taylor knew she could nail the perfect version.
Her spin on the Crookie takes it up a level by swapping out the plain croissant for a Three Mills Bakery chocolate croissant. Taylor says that the chocolate croissant brings an “extra luxuriousness and extra real estate for cookie dough and we use our in-house brown butter cookie dough. Ask us to toast it and you won’t be disappointed.”
The Catbird Crookie pops up regularly on the menu and we can guarantee, it’s worth it!
Catbird is open seven days a week 7am to 2pm. You can check out the full menu here. https://www.catbirdcanberra.com.au/
