Review: Salubrious hot sandwiches and sticky pastries star at this Brazilian-Portuguese bakery (2024)

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Several things stand out at Brazilian-Portuguese bakery Baked at Bina’s. First, streams of regulars, most of whom owners Sabrina and Brian Dias know by name, fill this cheery, sun-filled shop beside a suburban bus stop in Earlwood.

Even in cold, slanting winter rain they come. Families, couples, locals in utes and older gentlemen in zip-up jackets hopping off the bus. They queue to order fat, glistening malasadas, fried, sugar-dusted Portuguese yeast doughnuts filled with custard, caramel, apricot, berries or Nutella. Or trays of just-baked pasteis de nata, Portuguese custard tarts, shimmering and bronzed within a glass cabinet.

People sit at the half a dozen tables, inside and on the footpath, shooting the breeze over a pao na chapa com picanha, a soft-centred Brazilian pao frances roll filled with an eye-widening amount of chubby strips of tender rump cap steak and fried onions, or serves of golden, deep-fried coxhina, Brazilian chicken croquettes.

Another stand out is the prices. Brian and Sabrina, who opened the shop in 2017, own the premises and live above it, work to keep prices affordable.

Customers travel from Perth, Melbourne, Canberra for a taste of their heritage.

Coffees start at $3.80. A Portuguese malasada (or sonho in Brazil) is $4, and the six varieties of pao na chapa (Brazilian for “pressed on the grill”) sandwiches range from $4.50 for the butter-only (mantega) version to $14.50 for the steak. You can take home frozen packs of 10 croquettes, filled with chicken, prawn or codfish, for between $18.50 and $21.50.

The pao na chapa fillings define the Brazilian-Portuguese-Italian-Australian heritage of Brian and Sabrina – mortadella, ham and cheese, egg and bacon, and calabreza/chorico.

“People come and say, ‘I’d like a Brian Special’,” Sabrina says. “That means everything – all the fillings on one roll.”

Brian smiles. “I call that the Heart Attack,” he says. “It is delicious.”

Also doing a hot trade is Sabrina’s range of freshly baked bread. There is bolo de caco, a beautifully soft, flat Portuguese muffin, milk buns, baguettes and Italian-style Vienna loaves.

Racks are filled with kalamata rolls and loaves, baked for Earlwood’s Greek community, and popo seco, rotund, dense Brazilian dinner rolls.

“Look at this,” Brian says, pulling apart a popo seco at its score. “That’s a nice, dense roll. It’s got yeast, but not much, and that, with just butter – it’s beautiful.”

Brian, who was born in Australia and has Portuguese heritage, met Sabrina, who was born in Brazil and has Brazilian and Italian heritage, in Australia in 2000.

Sabrina, whose background is in economics, began her baking career after moving to Australia about 30 years ago, with time as head chef at Glicks Bakery in Melbourne. Brian, who says his mother named him after the late Nine newsreader Brian Henderson, previously worked in hospitality and as a mechanic.

He believes Baked at Bina’s, which the pair opened after running a patisserie in Marrickville, is Australia’s only Portuguese-Brazilian bakery. That means a wide and passionate clientele.

“It’s basically anyone that’s Portuguese-speaking from any part of the world,” he says. “Whether it be Brazil, Portugal, Madeira, Azores, Macau. A lot of people from the Africas come here, as well – Mozambique, Angola ... wherever the Portuguese went to.”

Customers also travel from Perth, Melbourne, Canberra, he says, for a taste of their heritage. He points at the trays of doughnuts.

“That includes the pineapple doughnuts,” he says. “That’s an Australian thing and you’ve got to have that because there are not many bakeries that have them any more. It’s a memory from when I went to school in Randwick. Get to school, have a pineapple doughnut.”

The feeling here is like visiting family. Partly because Brian and Sabrina, aka Bina, meet all with smiles, but also due to the bakery cafe’s design. Brian fitted it to resemble a kitchen with brass lightshades, glass-fronted cabinets filled with tea and coffee packets, and a creamy stone floor and counter tiles.

“This is our home, too,” Brian says. “I love it when people walk in and they say, ‘Oh, it smells so good in here.’ That’s why I love it, too. Waking up and smelling all the bread, the sweet things. It’s a good way of making people happy while also filling their bellies.”

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