Bread in Common

Co-owners Scott Brannigan and Nic Trimboli wanted to create a dining experience around the joys of eating dinner with your family and breaking bread at the table.

Bespoke ovens were installed to bake the four key styles of wood-fired, preservative-free loaves daily. "It's an old style of eating with family. Everything on the menu, you want to finish with bread," Brannigan says.

The space feels moody and romantic, perfect for a date night or dinner with friends. Its shabby chic interior features exposed red brick walls, low hanging pendant lights, long shared tables and an entire wine wall stacked with bottles from small-batch producers in West Australia and overseas, with a tilt towards minimal intervention.

There is a humble honesty to the menu, "I'm not trying to make a sweet potato, not a sweet potato. What we put on our plate is well-sourced ingredients," he says. In the kitchen, head chef, Aaron Moore, is at the helm, turning out dishes made to be shared. For entrees, slices of Common Loaf bread served with fragrant dukkah and olive oil are perfectly paired with plates of bresaola and house-made pickles. Larger offerings like sweet potato with macadamia butter, mushrooms with fennel and chestnuts, or lamb ribs with fresh mint and black garlic are current star items on a menu that changes along with the seasons. For a taste of the sea, tropical snapper with green mango and chilli fuses southeast Asian flavours with its sustainable ocean catch. Plenty of veggie options are a nod to their sister restaurant and garden, Coogee Common.

Closing "the loop" is at the heart of Bread in Common, with locally sourced ingredients shaping the menu.

"We reuse everything from making pineapple skin vinegar to starting up our own distillery, using old bread to ferment and make German liqueurs. We even pick veggies from our gardens at Coogee Common. Alongside the good food, we're starting to close the loop more." Brannigan says.

That distillery is based in West Perth, where the team send leftover bread from the Fremantle bakery to make hand-crafted gin. Botanicals are based on ingredients from the Coogee gardens. There is also a limoncello and coffee liqueur using in-house roasters, Mano a Mano, beans.

A foodie tip: if you want to hand over control to the chefs, Bread in Common's Chef's Table is an intimate dining room tucked on the private mezzanine upstairs overlooking the kitchen. Here you can sample a curated selection of the latest dishes, "it's a taste of everything off the menu and our chance to have some fun in the kitchen," says Brannigan.

They also open early on weekends serving up a breakfast menu from 8am.

Photo credit: Bread in Common