Canteen Delphine, 44 Brunker Road, Broadmeadow, Monday to Friday, 7am-2pm, Saturday, 8am-1pm.
Whether your favourite coffee spot is hidden in a cosy nook or is a famous destination, even the best cafes in Newcastle involve a compromise. The most carefully prepared cup will rarely be brought to you the quickest. The most welcoming staff will serve a coffee that could have squirted from a boiler at a football match. Or the food is exquisite but the service is forgettable. You win one, you lose the other.
There are exceptions. If together they're like our own expert panel of cafe heroes, then they'll need to find a seat for Canteen Delphine.
Leaving aside their excellent coffee for a moment, and their house-made cakes, brownies, friands and truffles, this cafe stands out most because of what it stands for - friendliness and warmth, professionalism and a genuinely impressive attention to detail.
On one of my visits to Delphine, the lovely and talented proprietor Sophie Pailas asked me what I was going to write about her cafe. It struck me as the most obvious question in the world to come from a business owner. Yet nobody had ever put it to me before. Maybe the others have been too proud. Or perhaps they weren't proud enough.
Friendliness and warmth, professionalism and a genuinely impressive attention to detail.
Because pride in what you prepare and serve every morning, without exception, is an ingredient as delicious as it is uncommon. You can taste it in everything at Delphine. A brown butter, Nutella and sea salt cookie ($4), baked, like everything else, from her very own recipe, isn't just a biscuit with your coffee.
Her pride and talent elevate it to an experience. A pistachio, semolina and rose cake ($7.50) is somehow moist and crumbly, tart but still sweet, familiar but then new.
Don't even start me on the tahini and halva brownie ($6.50). It's not just because it is decadent and rich that I still have half of one beside me. It's because I don't ever want it to leave.
It's that peculiar pair of feelings, of comfort mixed with wanting more, that brings me back to their coffee. The Moonwalker blend from Sydney roasters Mecca can only be found in Newcastle at Canteen Delphine. That makes perfect sense. Once you have had the pleasure of being welcomed by Pailas and her barista Mon, laid eyes on the finely patterned tulip in your milk and sipped at a double flat white ($4.50) spun to the perfect temperature, it will all fall into place. It's an exceptional, exclusive coffee. Served in an exceptional but inclusive place.
Like Pailas herself - baker, barista and creative - this is a blend that has earned its title as the ultimate coffee all-rounder. A third of the Moonwalker is grown in the south-western Andes of Colombia, adding a burst and intensity of aroma. The remainder derives from the fabled Pocos de Caldas farm in Brazil, offering a chocolatey sweetness, fruitiness and a perfect finish.
