Hi and welcome to our blog. In the future we will use it to tell you about all sorts of wonderful things, especially our unique products and the magnificent Australian native botanicals that we love to feature in them. However we thought we would get into the swing of things by using this first post to tell you a little bit more about us and what our little store is all about.
Our little café on the harbour
Lynch’s Hub is a little café on the Newcastle Foreshore that was founded by the Forrester family in 2017 and named after the Lynch family, who operated a much-loved local business on the same site for many years. Lynch’s Prawns was an institution in Newcastle. At the time that it closed in the early-80s, the business had been running for well over 60 years since 1935 and in that time it had become a focal point for the Novocastrian community. The Lynch’s themselves became important part of the fabric of the harbourside community in Newcastle.
In the mid-1980s the Newcastle foreshore was redeveloped and in their infinite wisdom the local authorities determined that bait and prawns was not in keeping with their vision for the harbourside and did not renew the Lynch’s lease on the funny little yurt-like building that had become such a landmark on the harbour. The building then stood empty, becoming increasingly derelict over the next 30 years.
We will create another blog post in the future about the history of the Lynch’s family and the site, but for now we will leave it there and fast forward to 2016. Blake is the owner and founder at Lynch’s Hub. He was a seafarer by trade but had suffered a very serious injury that ruled out going to sea in the future. While convalescing and wondering “what next”, he spotted a call for tenders on the site and decided that he wanted to be involved in breathing new life into this little landmark with its important connections to our history and restoring it to its role as a focal point for the Novocastrian community.
Our little team
The staff at our little venue have been together a long time and we’ve become more like extended family than co-workers. Some of our staff have been together since the café opened 8 years ago and if you know anything about the hospitality game then you will understand that this is remarkable.
Everyone brings something really special and very different to the mix and this passion shows in our menus and unique products. Blake is a real tinkerer by nature. A lot of the innovative processes that give rise to some of our unique products come from this tinkering and passion for food technologies. Blake is also a bit of a forager with a long-term hobby in bush foods and native flavours.
Ashleigh is our site manager at the café. Ash is a real weapon on the coffee machine and is behind the quality of the espresso service at our venue. She is also behind the flavours in a lot of our bush food products particularly when presented as beverages like teas, tonics, shrubs and cordials. Blake will often source native botanicals or come up with an idea for utilising a native product but its Ashleigh’s understanding of flavours and spice that will bring that all together in a way that delights the customers. Ashleigh has also been a vegan for many years and while Lynch’s Hub is not a vegan food business, we are about doing things differently and unique hand-made products. There’s a real creativity and innovative approach in vegan culinary skills that makes Ashleigh a real asset when it comes to thinking differently about a menu.
Lily is our head chef. Lily joined us in 2023 and its not any kind of exaggeration to say that everything changed for us overnight. We have had some fantastic chefs over the years at Lynch’s but we just clicked straight away with Lily. She seemed to catch the heartbeat of the place immediately. She understood the connection to the history of the site and its role in the community which is all so important to us. She connected with the food identity we are pursuing here and while every chef’s particular suite of skills and strengths is different, Lily’s strengths just align so well with what we are trying to do at Lynch’s. Most importantly though, Lily does things differently too and that fits like a glove here. You probably wouldn’t be reading this without Lily as her previous experience in bottling and jarring sauces and preserves for retail has been utterly indispensable in taking this next step in our business in creating this online offering.
We’ve had a lot of casuals and juniors over the years as well as the host of temporary staff that is the norm in this industry with its seasonality and highly casualised labour market. Many have left lasting impacts on what we do and how we do it. Many ex-staff members still attend our staff get togethers and are friendly with the team. We are now in the position where young casuals that started with us at 15 years of age have gone on to university or apprenticeships or moved into their intended careers and their younger siblings have come through behind them, starting with us as junior casuals. All four of Blake’s sons currently work in the business as junior casuals while attending high school. It has always been a small, wonderfully close-knit team here and that’s something we’re very proud and protective of.
Our food and coffee
From the outset at Lynch’s we wanted to do as much as possible by hand and to work as closely as possible with local suppliers. The idea was to keep the menu simple and focus on making everything fresh, in-house. We have worked with one coffee roaster since opening.
We have worked with Sprocket Roasters since opening our venue in 2017. Like us, Sprocket do things differently. They have designed, patented and built a world first fluid bed roaster that runs on bioenergy products (such as spent coffee grinds) instead of fossil fuels. This means that they produce fantastic coffee at a tiny fraction of the carbon footprint of a normal roaster. Most importantly, we love their coffee and so do our customers. We are very excited to be able to expand our collaboration with Sprocket and offer their roasts in an instant coffee format. It’s a real success in our mind that Sprocket feel that our instant products represent the quality of their beans well enough that they are now offering our instants as a product at the roastery.
Ours is a simple kitchen and so to exercise some flair and creativity our chefs have often focussed on sauces, jams, chilli, mixers and preserves. Over the years our customers started to ask us to bottle those products to take home and share with their families or gift to others. Given our special interest in the same, we have also developed a following amongst a community of people who are enthusiastic about Bush Foods and Australian Native Flavours. We are often contacted by people remarking that they would love to try our Native Flavour gelatos and sorbets but they live interstate, even internationally. So we found a way, Freeze Dried Gelato allows as to send these flavours in the mail, it lets visitors take them home to their families and it even allows us to share our magnificent Australian botanicals with the world.
Our Pantry
I’m writing this blog the day before our new online store goes live. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this next step in our business. Its not because I think it is going to make us rich or famous. We believe that the true value of food is not in the eating. Its in the sharing, its in the stories, its in the learning, its in the traditions and rituals. Food IS culture. The idea that somebody might learn about and develop an interest in Australian Native foods through our offering is exciting. The thought that our products might become of the morning ritual of somebody anywhere in this country or even outside of it, is thrilling. The fact our concepts could become a part of a gift given to show appreciation to a loved one is touching. The opportunity to share our stories and food culture with you is the whole reason we have built and operated this business for 8 years. This exciting new development gives us opportunities to do that in a completely new way.