Cobb Lane brings 36-hour sourdough to Melbourne’s CBD
Cobb Lane’s 15-seat Bennetts Lane bakery put 36-hour sourdough back on the CBD map, alongside Bread K’s salt bread and Bloomwood’s hybrid pastry counter.
Cobb Lane, Bread K and Bloomwood turned Melbourne’s CBD into a live map of where bakery culture is headed next. The city’s newest openings showed that sourdough still has pull, but it now sits beside Korean salt bread, shio pan and pastry-led formats that are reshaping what a central-city bakery can be.
Cobb Lane made the clearest statement. The Yarraville bakery, founded by former Vue de Monde chef Matt Forbes in 2013, opened its first CBD site on Bennetts Lane and kept its 36-hour-fermented sourdough identity intact. The 15-seat shop prepares product in Yarraville, sends it into the city and finishes it in on-site deck ovens, so the bread still lands with the smell and texture that built the brand’s reputation. Forbes, who once saw a city location as a gamble, said, “lots of businesses are made or broken in the city.” Now the move is about access as much as ambition, giving office workers and passersby a direct route to fresh bread in the middle of town.
The expansion also shows how far Cobb Lane has travelled from its origins. What began as a 75-square-metre bakery-café in Yarraville has grown into a wholesale operation supplying more than 200 cafes around Melbourne, with bread and pastry production scaled well beyond the original neighborhood footprint. The Bennetts Lane site, in the new development on Little Lonsdale Street, also carries an older local cue: the block has a baking history stretching back to the 1800s.
Bread K points to a different but related demand. The Korean bakery opened in Moonee Ponds in 2024, added a city store in March, and leaned into 15 varieties of sogeum-ppang, or salt bread, rather than classic sourdough alone. Co-owner Doyeon Kim said one of the biggest compliments in Korean food culture is that something is “not too sweet,” and the team imported a proofing machine from Korea to keep the baking process close to its roots. That level of detail helps explain why Bread K has moved from a suburban opening to a CBD presence so quickly.
Bloomwood pushed the same trend in another direction. The Exhibition Street bakery opened in August 2024 with a Japandi-influenced menu, then expanded into a second CBD space in 2026 with shio pan, five-grain croissant scrolls, focaccia pizza and specialty drinks. Even the service format was built for attention, with some drinks arriving alongside three baby croissants on a skewer.
Taken together, the openings showed a CBD bakery market that is no longer running on office traffic alone. Tourists, students, families and weekend crowds are now part of the mix, and that broader footfall is giving sourdough, salt bread and hybrid bakery counters room to grow in the city center. Cobb Lane’s Bennetts Lane shop was the strongest signal of that shift: sourdough is not retreating to the suburbs, it is moving deeper into the CBD.
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