This Japanese snack started out as karaoke fuel. Now you can try it at this Sydney bakery

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Akipan in Pyrmont is a Japanese bakery serving items I’ve never seen in Sydney before. Coffee is spiced with shichimi, a chilli seasoning with a 400-year-old history. There’s honey toast, which emerged during bubble-era Japan: owner Kazuaki “Aki” Ono, who grew up around Tokyo, has nostalgic fondness for this late-night karaoke snack. Grilled bread – slathered with a miso-mayo spread and hyper-patterned with shallots and sesame seeds – evokes co-owner Kana Ono’s experiments making Japanese pizza at home.

The couple opened their bakery in 2023, but originally met in the Barossa Valley in 2010, during a winery shoot. She was a media production co-ordinator and he was behind the lens. But their love of dough predates their Pyrmont business. Aki has tended to loaves for more than 30 years – mainly as a hobby, in between professional photography and commercial directing assignments.

Kana grew up in Gunma, a mountainous region northwest of Tokyo, where her parents ran a ski lodge. “I do remember my mum baking almost every day for our guests,” she says. When her parents retired, she cleared the lodge and found a childhood book where she’d listed her career ambitions. “My dream was to be a baker,” she says and laughs. “So that dream came true after 40 years.”

Akipan specialises in ultra-soft, spongey loaves known as shokupan. You’ll see this Japanese bread in katsu, egg and fruit sandwiches across Sydney, but it’s rare to see a bakery making so many varieties: loaves are flavoured with hojicha tea, airy with koji, swirled with matcha, studded with raisins, melted with tasty cheese and more.

“The standard shokupan takes about five hours,” Kana says. Some are more labour-intensive, though: sourdough shokupan requires 30 hours of fermentation.

Get Akipan’s bread by the loaf or served with toppings. The honey toast, for instance, is scored deeply – creating hiding spots the syrupy sweetness can ooze into. The bread’s thick and padded dimensions make clear why this specialty is sometimes called “brick toast”. It’s also known as “Shibuya toast” after its Tokyo bubble-economy origins.

What began as karaoke fuel has caught on in Taiwan, Singapore and beyond, where honey-sweetened bread essentially becomes an overstuffed letterbox crammed with fruit, chocolate and anything your sweet tooth can handle. At Akipan, it’s stripped back and simple: just honey-rich buttered toast you sink into. It’s lo-fi comfort food that erases bad news with every spongey bite.

Tea spills into the shokupan menu: hojicha toast is draped with mochi (rice cake), drizzled with caramel-like kuromitsu and sprinkled with roasted soybean powder. You can get matcha marbled toast blanketed with anko (red bean paste) or a compact “wheel”, where the green tea and anko-filled bread is sandwiched with a frilly mochi centre. Take-home matcha shokupan is fun: once unwrapped, it’s like slicing and eating cake.

There are other Japanese-inspired toasts (including the punchy miso-mayo-shallot flavour), but the couple also present their raisin bread with creamy, cinnamon-dusted slices of banana and Canadian maple syrup for people seeking more typical cafe food. They also offer sausage rolls, ham-cheese toasties and other bakery staples, but with an Akipan twist (see the shiitake-dashi focaccia).

Then there’s shichimi coffee, inspired by Aki’s late nights retouching photos or editing shots. “I’m maybe a coffee junkie,” he says and laughs. He can easily slam six cups a day, including at midnight. This inspired him to spike coffee with shichimi togarashi: a seasoning invented in 1625 by a Tokyo spice merchant. The seven-spice chilli blend varies across sellers and Akipan uses two varieties – so your coffee is partly flavoured by Shichimiya, which has sold its spice mix near Kyoto’s Kiyomizu temple since 1655.

The shichimi brings a warm, herbal hit to a just-frothed coffee blend from Market Lane. It evokes the seasoning’s medicinal origins, too. Akipan’s out-of-the-way surroundings are also restorative. It’s decorated with sumi-e artworks by Aki’s mum, showcases unique Japanese flavours and is quietly (and wonderfully) doing its own thing.

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