You won’t find a better spanakopita in Melbourne than this south-east bakery’s

Sure, Netflix is nice, but have you ever stood in front of the kitchen window at Sweet Filosophy and watched the team make baklava, bougatsa and biscuits? That’s the real action. Every day of the week, Kosta Patrino and his team are positioned in the small workroom in perfect pastry choreography. One person whips custard, another rolls filo, Patrino himself might be assembling ice-cream cakes. There’s the smell of caramel, toasted sesame, melted butter, walnuts; a show with freshly baked episodes rolling out every minute.

Sweet Filosophy is in Oakleigh, 14 kilometres south-east of the CBD and a famously Hellenic area in which about one in seven households speak Greek.

Much of Melbourne’s Greek food culture taps into traditions imported with the major migrant wave of the 1960s, but there’s another strand that expresses a more contemporary version of Greece, particularly the taste-making trends of today’s Athens. Patrino and his wife, Dora Theodorakopoulou, ran a bakery in the Greek capital before moving to Melbourne in 2015. After getting settled and surveying the scene, they saw a gap and opened their shop in 2021.

There were products they wanted to share with Melbourne, but the driving force was to be woven into community life, providing the punctuation points for regular days, and foods for special occasions. To be here is to witness the vignettes that speak of their success. Tradies pop in for koulouri and coffee, yia yia arrives for chats and tiropita, mum picks up a decorated birthday cake, and dad makes tonight’s dinner easy with a tray of spanakopita and a tub of parfait (which here means Cointreau, cherry and almond ice-cream).

You might also see people bursting with nostalgia when they see the pontikaki, a cake that looks like a mouse and is filled with chocolate mousse. I’m here for all of it, the classics and inventions, the dainty and basic, and I haven’t found a dud across more than a hundred items.

Tests of a Greek bakery always include koulouri, a sesame bread ring. The standard version here is good, tasty and chewy, as it should be. Patrino has also crafted a version stuffed with tahini and walnuts, and drizzled with honey, a crunchy, snacky spin on Cypriot sweet bread.

It’s a huge call, but you won’t find a better spanakopita in Melbourne: hand-rolled filo, enriched with olive oil, is layered with spinach, leek, spring onion, dill, mint and feta. You can taste the care for ingredients and the method. Bougatsa is made with a lighter, thinner, layered filo and filled with a sturdy semolina custard, which also stars in the ravani, a textured cake balancing texture and sweetness.

Beyond the standards, there are lesser-known treats such as diples, a wedding dessert in the Peloponnese, and seen all over Greece around Christmas. Patrino makes an egg dough spiked with ouzo “to make it crispy”, rolls it flat, then fries it. Then the tricky bit: the dough is rolled into a scroll with forks while it’s frying, and later doused in syrup. Traditionally, the more folds, the happier the marriage.