Melbourne bakery openings put sourdough front and center in 2026

Three new bakeries have opened in Melbourne, bringing sourdough and heritage baking into sharper focus across the Melbourne CBD and Abbotsford neighborhoods. Operators are leaning into house fermentation, heritage grains and creative uses of levain, turning sourdough from a loaf into sandwiches, croissants and even doughnuts on neighborhood menus.

Urbanstead is one of the new entrants whose menu emphasizes heritage baking and specifically uses sourdough for items such as sandwiches. Across the openings, bakers are treating their sourdough starters as program ingredients rather than just a base for bread. That shift shows up in signature items: sourdough sandwiches built on open, well-fermented crumb; croissants laminated with a sourdough tang; and doughnuts borrowing starter-driven depth for a more complex finish.

For people who eat and bake in these neighborhoods, the practical value is immediate. If you want to taste where house fermentation meets café fare, head to the Melbourne CBD and Abbotsford to sample these menus. Look for breads made with heritage grains, which often present nuttier flavors and denser crumbs, and for menus that list fermentation times or describe the starter profile. These details give clues about how much levain character has been trained into the final product.

The trend also matters for home bakers and local pros. Seeing sourdough used beyond boules and batards—into sandwiches, viennoiserie and fried pastries—encourages experimentation with longer ferment schedules, autolyse tweaks and more confident use of mother cultures. It makes the case that maintaining a starter is an investment that pays dividends across a whole bakery program, not only on the breadboard.

Community impact goes beyond flavor. These openings create new retail opportunities for heritage grain suppliers and for teaching fermentation techniques at the neighborhood level. They provide tasting rooms where consumers can compare crumb, crust and acidity side by side, and give home bakers a hands-on way to calibrate expectations for their own loaves.

The takeaway? If you want to see where sourdough culture is heading locally, try the new spots in the CBD and Abbotsford and pay attention to how bakers are applying their starters. Our two cents? Taste deliberately: order a plain slice, then a sandwich or pastry made with the same starter to hear the full story of the levain at work.