Newport · Est. 2018
Laura had spent eight years working in some of Sydney's best cafés and restaurants — Surry Hills, Newtown, Potts Point. Tom had been roasting coffee for six. Between them they had a pretty clear picture of what made a café genuinely good, and what made most of them ordinary.
In 2017, they moved to Newport to start a family. And within a few months they'd both noticed the same thing — for a suburb this beautiful, with this many people who clearly appreciated good food and coffee, Newport's café scene was disappointingly average.
So they did something about it. Headland opened in April 2018 in a small heritage space on Barrenjoey Road. The first week was chaos. The second week was better. By the end of the first month, they had regulars.
We rotate single origin coffees every four to six weeks and work only with Australian roasters who source ethically. Tom still selects and oversees every bean we use. The batch brew filter is his favourite — and ours.
The menu changes seasonally — sometimes more often than that, if something stops being good or something better comes into season. We source locally where we can and make almost everything in-house, including our bread, granola, and sauces.
Half our team has been with us for more than three years. We pay properly, we roster reasonably, and we close on Monday so everyone actually gets a day off. Happy staff make better coffee. It's not more complicated than that.
Newport isn't somewhere we commute to. Laura and Tom live five minutes from the café. Their kids go to Newport Public School. Most of their friends are regulars — and their regulars have become friends.
We sponsor the Newport Surf Life Saving Club's annual dinner and donate surplus food daily to the Meals on Wheels program operating out of Mona Vale. Not as a PR exercise — just because it's the right thing to do with food that would otherwise be wasted.
Come and visit →Open 7 days. No bookings. Just good coffee and food that's actually worth getting out of bed for.