Cafe Nookie

I have no idea why this coffee dispenser has only one $ sign besides their name. for a hole in the wall the coffee is the most expensive in the area. the coffee is good but that’s no excuse for pure greed. I’ll happily give my money to other local businesses who don’t rip me off thanks.

It’s a little bit hard to comment on Café Nookie without mentioning the obvious: IT’S THE SMALLEST CAFE IN AUSTRALIA. (Probably.) (Most likely.)
It is also painted with nice colours: a red stripe, an olive green wall, and a neat wooden sign. Elegantly packaged charm.
Ok, so Café Nookie is not somewhere you can go inside. It is a seriously one-​person situation. And that person is the barista. (Who is often Sam. He might also be a roaster. Best to ask him that yourself.) Anyway yeah, Café Nookie makes Coffee, Tea & Me look spacious. Enough about that — everyone knows size doesn’t matter, right?
Surry Hills coffee fiends of the Belvoir /​Elizabeth St /​Cleveland variety tend to mill about outside, drawing on the chalk board (which doubles as Nookie’s gate), or taking instagram pictures of their coffees, while crouching on little coloured stools. So: this place is best for take-​away coffee on the go. Though they do have a few seats outside, if you feel like sitting down on the side of the road on Cleveland Street and breathing in those sweet carbon monoxide fumes with your latte.
They use Café de Gabriel coffee, and while it’s not to the glory levels of Single Origin or Campos flagship stuff, they do very satisfactory job. If you’re hungry there are often piles of scrumptious looking sweet things on the front counter, which prove very, very hard to ignore. Also, they have Healthy Balls. Which probably aren’t that healthy, but what the heck, they’re healthy balls!
If you crane your neck to look inside Nookie, you can see a smiling 1950s-​style sign that says, «I just don’t give a sh#t.» Fair enough. I understand.

Nookie is extremely cute. Having driven past it a tonne of times, I’d never stopped, despite always wanting to, compelled by the mystery of this hole in the wall coffee shop.
And that’s all it is. Just a hole in the wall. Arguable Sydney’s smallest café. Looking inside it for the first time I expected to find that this little window may have led to a seating section out the back, or a kitchen, a warehouse or something other than what I found — a 2m squared box with a simple two group espresso machine, four or five pastries and a cute barista, just sitting, chilling in his little nook.
The chalk etchings on the door change every time I drive past, making it worth stopping to check out the art as you neck your coffee. You can stay and savour your hot cup (there’s a bunch of stools out the front and easy parking down Little Buckingham St), as long as you don’t mind the ever present throttle of traffic.
The coffee was quite good, although it didn’t have the lingering sweet after-​taste that I’ve become accustomed to. I think it’s possible that my coffee was tastier because the barista was so tasty himself. This is a new theory I’m willing to put to the test.
I would gladly do it again … all for the nookie.