Don’t miss the spectacular choc-rippled pastries at this destination croissanterie

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You can’t rush the croissants at Layers Sydney – each buttery pastry here takes five days to make. They’re not ordinary baked goods, either, as a glimpse at the dazzling counter reveals. Many begin with the blueprints of a plain croissant and then bloom into something spectacular.

Take the tiramisu flavour, created by co-owner Frances Song and pastry chef Coco Lam. It’s a sculptural wonder: chocolate sails are cushioned with thick chantilly mascarpone ribbons and sprinkled with chocolate shavings and coffee jelly cubes. If architect Frank Gehry designed a croissant, it might look like this. But this is a pastry with a payload of oozing coffee-infused cream inside. To give this a signal boost, crushed coffee beans are added to the croissant – amplifying the pastry’s smoky, espresso-like power.

This isn’t just an inspired take on tiramisu, it also reveals Layers Sydney’s back story. The coffee that fuels this flavoured croissant is a signature blend by co-owner Jiyoon Song, a roaster at Headlands and Frances’ husband.

They first met in Seoul and had originally planned to open a cafe in South Korea. But circumstances instead led to them launching Layers Sydney in April with Lam (whose CV includes hatted restaurants Nomad and Alpha) and baker Elwin Ung, Frances’ classmate at Meadowbank TAFE. During their patisserie studies, they dreamed they’d open a bakery one day.

They’ve quickly gained an enthusiastic fan club for the St Leonards cafe: one group of visitors travelled from Newcastle two weekends in a row, enduring four-hour round trips for each pastry run. Another guest learnt of Layers while scrolling through social media in Dubai and made it a priority stop after Sydney Airport. The one-of-a-kind menu inspires such dedication. (Another bonus is that the pastries are designed to taste good when reheated: they don’t become moistureless husks.)

So what’s on this menu that inspires such devotion? There’s the signature “chocolate bar” croissant, an update on the classic pain au chocolat. Frances thinks the traditional pastry chocolate ratio is off balance, where the chocolate all clumps together and there’s too much dough in other bites. “That’s not really pleasant,” she says. And Jiyoon doesn’t enjoy the typical dark chocolate that’s used. At Layers Sydney, they’ve wrapped their croissants with bands of cocoa crisps and tucked a well-measured dose of milk chocolate inside.

To dial up your cacao intake even further, there’s the triple-choc hazelnut croissant. It tastes like a fancy Ferrero Rocher, thanks to the toasted nuts and praline. The pastry is also richly pinstriped with cocoa ribbons and it’s packed with chocolate in dark, milk and custard forms. There’s more than chocolate; the kimchi triple cheese pastry has a shaving of gruyere atop the melted mix of tasty, parmesan and mozzarella that’s encased with stir-fried kimchi.

It’s one of many Korean-inspired treats at Layers Sydney, such as the bulgogi beef and gochujang-spiced pork tarts. Then there’s the bestselling truffle cheese and caramelised onion tart and sausage bread with tomato sauce and corn mayo salad – imagine a pizza merged with a hot dog, Asian remix edition. “It’s the childhood bread that local bakeries have in Korea,” says Frances.

The coconut and black sesame bread cubes are another highlight: instead of nursing sourdough during Sydney’s initial COVID lockdown, Frances experimented with the milk bread that led to these refreshingly sweet loaves.

The pastry counter might empty long before closing time, but you can still order macarons flavoured with black sesame, Earl Grey and mocha infused with Headlands’ custom blend. Created with roasting champion Takumi Sakamoto, the coffee is meant to evoke peanut butter and cinnamon. You can drink it with maple syrup – inspired by Korean drinks.

Layers Sydney is an excellent addition to the city’s baking scene and joins the gold rush of patisseries smartly reimagining what you can feature in a pastry counter (see Tenacious Croissant’s Korean-dumpling remix of a sausage roll, or Home Croissanterie’s genius potato-chip-like pastry). “We’re hoping in the future one day we’ll be able to open one in Seoul,” says Frances. But before they go global, I’m grateful our city is the ground zero for their brilliant and unique pastries.