Jul 2, 2019 Cheap Eats
The Metro team sampled the goods from new lunchtime bakery Mizu Bread in Eden Terrace. Here’s what we thought.
When we found out about Mizu Bread, Japanese fine-dining restaurant Kazuya ’s new minimalist bakery, our minds immediately went to the chicken katsu sando. Would they have it? Would it be good? Would we want another one five minutes after devouring the first in five bites?
It was the late-morning of deadline day. Or, to be specific, the second of two days we have to send PDFs to a printer in Henderson which turns those PDFs into a magazine people can buy in the supermarket. The day before had not gone well. We were behind schedule and people from the production team (who deal directly with that printer in Henderson) were dropping by Metro’s row of desks, asking “How’s it going?” and then, as the morning wore on, “Any more pages ready?”
Our editor had been here since 6, joining a sub-editor who’d been here since 5.30, trying to catch us up. He hadn’t eaten breakfast. (And he’s not a person who does well with not eating breakfast.) Then, around 11.30am, our writer Jean returned to our row of desks carrying two brown bags of psychic sunshine from Mizu Bread.
At Mizu Bread, there was already a cluster of people huddled around the entrance, bouncing up and down on their heels in the pursuit of fluffy, gorgeous bread baked by Kazuya staff member Yuko Segawa. (The bread was described by one of the Metro team as like one of the “light and airy and ever-so-slightly sweet loaves you make in one of those home bread-makers everyone was really into for a hot minute in the early 2000s.”) A table was placed in the doorway, and a glowing yellow cabinet was carried out by owner Kazuya Yamauchi. Included in the crowd were representatives from a rival magazine. “I almost don’t want to write about this place,” one of them said, in the spirit of keeping this from blowing up. But they did anyway. And so are we.
At this point, Mizu Bread had only been open for a little over a week and is definitely about to blow up. We imagine their cabinet already sits empty well before their early closing hour of 1pm rolls around.
We got: a box each of tamago egg, pork cutlet and chicken katsu sandwiches (all $11), one small jar of crème caramel ($6) and three Valrhona chocolate buns.
All meals were eaten at our desks, oils and sauces accidentally dripping onto the floor.
Tess Nichol, Metro’s Digital Editor (nearly 30), was drawn to the sandwiches’ nostalgic, lunchbox-like quality. “Anything which is cut all small and arranged like a lunchbox gets a big tick from me, because I’m baby and I like eating something which looks like my mum might have prepared it for me.”
The tamago egg sandwiches, silky egg salad cut through with truffle aioli and bookended by two pieces of fluffy white bread, was a notable hit – in fact, every single person on the Metro team had something positive to say about them. “The egg sandwich, perhaps the best sandwich there is for a lunch before midday,” editor Henry Oliver mused, “was, if not life-changing, definitely mood-changing. It was an enlivening, if too messy for desk eating, first course.”
Pork cutlet was “exactly cooked, slightly pink in the middle” and was Tess’s favourite. Writer Alex Blackwood rhapsodised that it was “leagues above any other simple pork sandwich you’re likely to find in the area.”
Then the chicken katsu – deeply flavoured, crumbed and fried chicken thigh, with mustard and Japanese barbeque sauce. We sunk our teeth into clouds of bread. On paper, it seems deeply underwhelming: it’s bread and chicken. In our mouths, it was a different story: rich and creamy and light all at once (it’s that bread!) with a little textural crunch. Yes, we want another one five minutes after devouring one in five bites. No, we would not recommend sharing this amongst four hungry people, as we did, but encourage you to take a little box all for your lonesome.
Treat yourself to a few of those Valrhona chocolate buns, too: chewy little balls of bread filled with silky chocolate truffle. Some of us only got half of one in an act of valiant restraint to be “not selfish”. The chocolate bun was fallible only in its finiteness. Same with the Japanese-style crème caramel, which was, as they say, “heaven”.
Mizu Bread also sells various breadsticks and loaves which looked very good.
Photography: Alex Blackwood
Tuesday-Thursday
11am-1pm
193 Symonds St, Eden Terrace
