Oliver Brown is somewhere I’ve associated with being a chocolate cafe that serves up waffles and drinks. My first visit last year seemed to confirm this impression because T ordered a mint hot chocolate while I had a chocolate lava cake.
An Oliver Brown, however, opened in Haymarket recently. Having run out of other dessert choices, N and I popped in after lunch one week. To my surprise, chocolate desserts feature on probably half their menu. The other half is based on fruit. Chocolate desserts are rather heavy for post-lunch dessert, so fruit flavours are welcome.
I’m always on the look out for successful Japanese inspired Western desserts. So trying to yuzu and green tea opera cake ($7.50) was a no-brainer. I have a recent weakness for all things yuzu and N has a spot for opera cake. There a four layers of green tea sponge, three layers of yuzu cream, and one layer of passionfruit cream. Perhaps to cater to more Western tastes and the more general public, the yuzu is very mild and has none of the punch that I’ve come to expect from yuzu flavoured foods. The yuzu doesn’t register when you take a bite of the cake with all the layers – the passionfruit overpowers despite only being one layer – and lingered only as an aftertaste.
When I separated the top few layers from the pasisonfruit, however, the yuzu makes it presence known albeit still in a very subtle barely-there way. While I’d have prefer a punchier yuzu flavour and a slightly more bitter green tea sponge, overall, the cake was ‘adventurous’ but remained elegant and tasty, unlike the recent creations of some famous Sydney patissieres.
One of the four menu boards is dedicated to ‘frutti crushers’. With the cake, I had the Lychee Frutti Crusher – it tastes of canned lychees (not a bad thing!) blended just enough that there’s some texture on the tongue. It wasn’t amazing but it’s certainly a nice drink to cool down with on a hot day.
And another time I visited, I had the Lemon, Lime and Mint Frutti Crusher ($7.80), which I much prefer to the lychee. Lime is the dominant flavour, which gave it the pretty green colour. There’s flecks of lime zest, as well as bits of pulp, that add texture to the drink. As lime is the dominant flavour, the drink was quite sour despite being sweetened. I like sour, though. As for the lemon, I can’t detect any of the bitterness I usually associate with it. The mint component, however, was pleasantly subtle – Western drinks seem to be less heavy handed in using mint than Asian drinks.
Evidently, Oliver Brown has made its way into my dessert heart.
Eating carbs for dessert isn’t something that I can comfortably do without intentionally undereating during the meal beforehand. Eating dessert as a meal itself, as fun as that sounds in the moment, is never a good idea. So after filling up on light noodles, N and I headed over to Oliver Brown where we had wanted to try the churros for some time. It’d been over 6 years since I last had churros (at San Churro in Glebe), so another taste was well overdue!
We had the Baked Churros for 2 ($12.50) – 12 churros with milk and dark chocolate dipping pots.
Unlike your typical deep-fried churros, these were baked. They get their shape from the press that’s used. The churros are fresh, crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, which makes for a very satisfying and more-ish dessert. The cinnamon on many of the churros was a tad overly generous, which made gave the churros a harsh and bitter taste when eaten by itself. The bitterness was easily solved with the milk chocolate dipping pot, but was accentuated by the dark chocolate. Without cinnamon though, I think the dark chocolate dipping pot would’ve been quite tasty. The amount of chocolate in the dipping pots was just right for 12 churros.
And the Rose Lemonade ($6.50). N’s on a quest to find zesty lemonade without having to make it herself. Disappointingly, though, this tasted like Schweppes Lemonade mixed with rose syrup.
After the disappointment of Pishon Bakery last visit we opted for Oliver Brown this time despite the myriad of independent cafes around Eastwood.
Being a chocolate cafe, it took me an embarrassing number of visits to try their chocolate products. I seem to be building tolerance to caffeine lately (despite not increasing my consumption) so I ordered the Belgium mocha in milk chocolate ($6.00). It came with two choc chips that melted in the drink. The mocha was enjoyable with a rich and round chocolate flavour and subtle hints of coffee without being overly bitter or cloying.
We also tried the Coffee Swiss Roll ($6.00), a coconut based chocolate sponge cake with coffee cream. It was a rather disappointing came – the sponge cake was dense and dry while the coffee cream was stiff and lacked creaminess.
Oliver Brown is great for their drinks and chocolate desserts but their cakes seem to be a hit or miss.
Oliver Brown is located at various locations in Sydney, Australia.