A pastry-fueled cafe lands in Lambton
Does the name Covered in Crumbs ring any bells? If that’s a yes, you’ll no doubt remember pastry chef Gareth Williams' extraordinary pastry skills. Whether it was his lemon curd tart, savoury brioche, or those epic sausage rolls, it was a sad day when Gareth and his wife Paula closed the doors to their Mayfield shop.
When whispers surfaced that hospitality powerhouse Ben Richardson (Autumn Rooms) was teaming up with Gareth to launch Crumb—a brand-new pastry cafe concept in Lambton, dedicated to hand-crafted excellence, we were both ecstatic, and a little surprised at the same time.
Ben, who is known best for bringing people together over great coffee and food, says Crumb is about community, creativity, and damn good pastries, and gave us the rundown on how this all came to be.
“I first spoke to Gareth about the idea of Crumb two to three years ago, but it coincided with me opening Autumn Rooms at Stockton, so I put the idea on the back burner."
“In that time, Gareth started working at EXP in the Hunter Valley, but the idea continued to bubble away.”
Jumping on the Elder Street space when it came up for lease mid-2024, Ben admits he wasn’t 100% sure what he wanted the business to be.
Ben brought in Gareth to work across the two Autumn Rooms venues in 2024 (have you tried the house-made sausage rolls at Stockton yet? Or the incredibly good hotcake at Darby Street?). As a creative force behind the scenes, Gareth takes charge of concept development, menu and recipe innovation, and refining dishes with his signature touch of creative chaos.
His experience and flair for transforming ideas into exceptional culinary experiences will ensure that Crumb, along with Autumn Rooms, stays ahead of the curve and continues to delight people with bold new creations.
Interested to hear what brought Gareth back to the business of pastries – a chapter we thought had well and truly closed when Covered in Crumbs did – we caught up with the man himself. Gareth explains,
“I thought I was done with the pastry world. I was considering getting out of hospitality altogether, but I started consulting to a few businesses on food and recipe development, that’s why Ben initially contacted me, to get some help with the Autumn Rooms, and that’s how the idea for Crumb first came about.
“I’m not trying to rejuvenate Covered in Crumbs, what Ben wanted to do was pay homage in some way to what Paula and I achieved with Covered in Crumbs."
“I’ll be working with a great pastry team that I’ll train, I’ll be there in the background, but now I just get to do the fun creative aspect and teaching, which is a really nice place to be in my career at this time in my life.”
So what can we expect to find when we visit Crumb?
“The offering is very much an eatery focus, there’ll be a couple of breads, but nothing too heavy. I’m taking the best parts of what I love to do, and solely focusing on that part of the pastry work.”
“There’ll be lots of different croissant products, laminated products, and enriched dough products like brioche. The menu will change all the time, and will feature some creative weekend additions.”
“I would definitely say that food style is creative chaos, like everything else that we're doing at Crumb. The fundamentals of pastry work are very structured, so once you have an understanding of how things work and what you can do, and the potential of ingredients, then there are no rules, it can be interpreted however you want.
“You can try different flavours together and work with what's available at that time, for example plums or cherries are only available for three weeks a year. So putting them with different flavour combinations that you would mostly see in creative restaurant desserts, that you sit down to eat, we're making them portable, so you can take them away, but still enjoy those restaurant flavours.
“The abstract art of pastry, that's what I really like. When you see things to the natural eye, you notice or even look for imperfections, like if the line's not perfectly straight. But I lean into that, not to hide any imperfections, and have that abstract art aesthetic as opposed to it trying to be perfect. Not every element I use is perfect, like the leaves or the size of the fruit, it can actually look more interesting and appealing. That style tends to grab your attention.
When it comes to the venue vibe, think pared-back minimalist design meets chaotic, with Eye Know by DeLa Soul playing in the background and upcycled vintage merch reimagined with modern designs as Ben explains,
“The visual aspect of the venue is key as well. We wanted to give customers the opportunity to see into the Crumb kitchen, and the passion that goes into actually creating something. The way that Gareth talks about his work, and his passion about food, and the flavours that he's working with is really inspiring.
“I always find it really mesmerising watching the intensity of really good chefs, the structure with how they work, you don’t see that when the chefs are shoved out the back in a kitchen.
“Gareth has an amazing creative mind, and he’s using his background in fine dining to influence Crumb menu flavours, but also creating items that are more simple, like really nice fresh bread and using cured meats to make simple, but fresh sandwiches.
‘This all connects nicely with the single origin and coffee we use. It's a product that's produced and processed overseas, so you get variations and that's what’s exciting about hand making products, it’s that variation that makes it unique."
Working with local design agency Headjam to create the Crumb brand, Ben explains that Luke, Sarah, and the team were so inspired by the story of the business, in particular Gareth and his absolute passion for food, and the way he spoke of food being art, that Headjam really leant into this.
“Headjam were talking about all this AI crap that's out there, and that's what we're pushing back against, with everything going automated, we're going the other way and leaning into hand making. That’s where the upcycled merch ties in.
“We wanted to do things differently, so we came up with the idea of reusing T-shirts we find at charity shops and giving them new life by hand-screen-printing hand-drawn designs over the top of them, in a completely chaotic way. We’re taking things back 20 or more years, when everything was screenprinted. It all ties back into the creativity of Crumb and the influence of the 90s.”
Crumb is set to become that place you drop in and grab a coffee from, and take your flaky, buttery, ridiculously delicious haul down to the park. Or just stay—because once you taste Crumb we’re pretty sure you won’t want to leave.
Photography Credit: Sophie Tyler
