It’s hard to believe there hasn’t always been a cafe in this spot, considering it’s neatly on the edges of Ashfield, Dulwich Hill, Canterbury and Marrickville. It’s the understanding that a quality café should offer more than just good food and coffee coupled with an atmosphere that effortlessly blends into the neighbourhood that set Outfield apart. And that, to borrow from Richie Benaud, is marvellous.
Parents sit barefoot enjoying a perfectly brewed flat white and an open-top artisan sandwich in the dappled sun, while babies freely explore the grassy hill. The aptly named Outfield is the new Ashfield cafe bringing a sense of homely sophistication from indoors to out, to an inner west park-side (well cricket pitch-side) suburban locale.
Armed with sparkling pineapple and passionfruit sodas and an excellent creamy flat white, our table swoons through the smash’s layers of avocado, furikake (a spicy Japanese seasoning), fat and crispy chicken pieces, fermented chilli and lemon sprinkled with dill on gluten-free bread.
How glorious to find a park in Sydney that still acts like a park, complete with a bandstand, a cricket pitch and plenty of room to fly a kite. For the next six months, it's our civic duty to be outside in the sunshine, so get your food to go, grab a picnic rug and a fold-up wooden tray to act as a table, and relearn the ancient art of not doing much at all for a while.
Outfield is in a cute ’50s brick building with porthole windows overlooking a rolling park lawn. Its clientele looks as though it’s just strolled in from a stock-image library in the category “local community”.
