Local cafes embrace cordial living with home
IN SOME of Sydney's cafes and restaurants, diners who ask for a bottle of Coke receive a polite but firm refusal.
An increasing number of eateries are taking a stand against commercial soft drinks, replacing them with gourmet beverages made on site.
The trend is catching on at casual cafes, which now make their own ginger beer and lemonade, and at fine dining restaurants. Neil Perry's Spice Temple offers a range of house-made sodas, with flavours from lemongrass and rosewater to granny smith apple and jasmine. Fleetwood Macchiato in Erskineville serves no drinks that come in bottles or cans. Instead, they use fresh fruit to make pomegranate lemonade and mandarin cordial, carbonating the brews with an old-fashioned SodaStream machine.
Tara Byrne, one of the cafe's three owners, grew up with a SodaStream and was delighted when she spotted one for sale. ''It's not really a fad for us,'' she said. ''We wanted to do something to reduce the amount of waste we generated.''
Banning commercial soft drink has reduced the cafe's bottle and packaging wastage and Byrne said it also helped minimise its carbon footprint. The cafe carbonates tap water instead of selling bottled mineral water. ''A lot of bottles of sparkling water come from Italy and I hate to think of all those air miles.''
A taste for experimentation prompted Matt Stone to start making his own fizzy drinks, but when he became executive chef at the pop-up restaurant Greenhouse, the drinks suited the venture's sustainable ethos. The restaurant moves from city to city. Stone makes soft drinks daily, so there is no need to use electricity to keep them cool and fresh.