Just Opened: The Melting Cheese, Sydney

The Melting Cheese is a brand new Thai style cafe that has landed in Sydney from the same team from Mango Coco and Issho cafe. This cafe focuses on pastries along with a cafe and brunch menu with risottos, pastas and grilled dishes. Find out what is a must order here and when to visit to skip the queue!

It’s early days for the cafe on Liverpool Street in Sydney's CBD but still if you come around 1 o'clock you'll probably have to wait in a queue on a weekend. Mr NQN and I arrive just after 12pm on a Saturday and head past the display of pastries and drinks, up the stairs and past the small pastry kitchen with chefs making and shaping their signature tarts. It's busy with just a couple of tables free and we get a table straight away.

The cafe is all about pink pastels and jade green marble tables. Service is friendly but all ordering is done via a QR code. The name The Melting Cheese is almost a misnomer. You would think that there was fondue, raclette or a cheese menu but this is a brunch and pastry cafe. If anything I would call it the melting butter because of the buttery crisp pastries that come out of this kitchen.

The strawberry oolong tea has cold jasmine tea, strawberry puree and frozen berries and is topped with a cream cheese foam. Like all layered drinks it does need to be stirred just to distribute the sweetness but I really enjoy this. I ordered Mr NQN a banoffee cheesecake shake. It's said to contain banana blended with milk and caramel syrup, topped with caramel foam and silky cheese pudding but really all I tasted was unsweetened milk. Out of the two drinks the strawberry is definitely the pick.

You can go here for brunch, lunch or dinner or you can order the pastries and cakes to eat in (although I had read that the pastries sell out by dinner time). We choose to do a combination of a bit everything and we start with the beef tartare with beef tenderloin tartare, ponzu, shallots, chives and dried egg yolk topped with batons of pickled daikon. The beef tartar is more like a Korean beef yukhoe which has a little bit of wetness and a coarser texture. It’s quite tasty and it comes with two slices of toasted croissant although you do need about four slices of toast for the portion size.

Mr NQN loves the yuzu prawn pasta which seems to be very popular today with a lot of customers ordering it. The king prawns are large and butterflied and served with a yuzu accented dashi cream sauce so you get a little bit of citrus to contrast with the cream as well.

As for me, I’m saving my stomach for the sausage roll. I don’t know what I was expecting but it is literally a sausage in a pastry roll not a sausage mince sausage roll. The sausage has a centre of cheese and it’s very tasty although I don’t think it would satisfy the craving for an actual sausage roll. Still I do love that flaky croissant dough and the absolute crispness of each bite. We took one home and it reheated perfectly in the oven.

The pork and mayo croissant is interesting. It is split in half horizontally and spread with a hollandaise style of sauce in the centre and Kewpie mayonnaise and pork floss on top with furikake. It’s a little sweet, savoury, crunchy and dry at the same time.

Now we’re onto the pastries and this is where I think they really excel. While the savouries were nice I loved the pastries more. The first one we try is the cheese custard pastry with a little bit of saltiness in it from the salted caramel sauce and gorgeous buttery pastry. We can peel apart the layers of the pastry it's that layered and distinct. The predominant flavour for this is just pure butter and salted caramel and my mouth is watering recalling this.

Likewise, the Mochi matcha one has a centre of stretchy, chewy mochi and a matcha custard and the salty hit from salted caramel and that lovely layered buttery pastry with a touch of bitterness as the matcha flavour does not hold back. We also try the egg croissant tart ($8.90) with a crispy croissant tart shell filled with creamy egg custard and a hidden centre of salted caramel sauce but out of the three, I loved the cheese tart the most followed by egg tart and then the matcha mochi tart.

Mr NQN notices lots of plates of mochi skin pancakes going past so we order some. These are pancakes layered with strawberries, cream and strawberry sauce with a scoop of strawberry ice cream on top. The stack of pancakes is covered in a sheet of fresh, warm mochi that gives it a nice textural component as well. It is large and I’d say best for sharing. If you’re a strawberries and cream and mochi lover as I am, this is your dessert.

As we leave we pass the chefs that are still busy making the tarts and by now at 1:30pm, there is a queue that reaches out into the street.

So tell me Dear Reader, do you like to watch chefs making food? And do you like mochi?

This meal was independently paid for.

The Melting Cheese

Level 1/88 Liverpool St, Sydney NSW 2000

Phone: (02) 9967 9265

Open Sunday to Thursday 11am-11:30pm

Friday & Saturday 11am-9:30pm