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Pave, Norwood: Parade Car Park Turned Café, Serving Award Winning Coffee

Pave Cafe coffee's next to Paris Creek Milk

When Adelaideans think of The Parade in Norwood, the city’s east, they picture a diverse range of eateries serving up all kinds of gourmet delicacies, high fashion, and good coffee… really, really good coffee.

Competition is fierce along The Parade in Norwood. Luckily, there is no shortage of dishes showcasing SA’s finest produce at Pave, a café taking pride in their meals created using fresh, local, quality ingredients and their crowning glory – their award-winning coffee made using Paris Creek Farms bio-dynamic organic milk.

Pave owner Rimu took ownership of the café 4 years ago and has since grown it from a small cobblestone courtyard café to a well-known Norwood eatery, serving up a delicious and enticing breakfast and lunch menu Tuesday – Sunday. Rimu says their regular customer base continues to grow and puts this down to their focus on nailing the three principles of hospitality, “good food, quality ingredients and great service”. 

When owner Rimu purchased the then small car park turned café, he set out transforming the hidden gem into an ultimate meeting place for people and their 4-legged best friends to gather, enjoying good food and coffee made using locally sourced and quality produce.

We caught up with Rimu to talk more about his award-winning food and coffee. 

Tell us a bit about Pave and where it all started.

The business has been operating for around 7 years, I have owned it for the past 4 years now. We basically built it up from a car park area to a little courtyard café with umbrellas, chairs and tables. We then added a kitchen and a roof and took it from there! We focus mainly on breakfast and brunch, trading Tuesday – Sunday 7.30am – 1:30pm for food and 2.30-3pm for coffee and drinks.

Every year we have grown in size and reputation along The Parade, we went from a non-existent space to what we are today. There was nothing here originally, it was just a car park that was used for storage. We saw an opportunity and got to work on a concept; we think it’s a great use of the space!

What is your favourite part about working within the hospitality industry?

For me it’s definitely connecting with people. We have a very loyal following now and we quite often see people on a regular basis. So, it’s very rewarding when people come in and say you are doing the three fundamentals of hospitality well and that’s ‘good food, good produce and good service’.

We are passionate about upholding this, we feel quite often these days you go to a place, and they may excel in one of those three areas but are lacking in the others and it throws off the whole experience. So, we try and provide an all-round good experience for our customers.

We feel lucky in the fact we have a big enough space to serve a large amount of people, whilst remaining small enough to offer personalised service to each and every customer. We love to go out and interact with our customers to form a personal connection, this is key to retaining regular customers!

What Paris Creek Farms Bio-dynamic Organic products do you use and why?

We use the Paris Creek Farms Bio-Dynamic Cream on Top Milk, and the Paris Creek Farms Bio-Dynamic Reduced Fat Milk for skim milk customers. We want our customers to receive a coffee made with two high quality milks. We love that even the reduced fat milk is creamy and doesn’t leave customers with a coffee that tastes watered down.

Paris Creek Farms products are definitely a big component of the success we have had with our coffee and food. For our granola and muesli dishes we use the Paris Creek Farms Bio-Dynamic Bush Honey and Vanilla yoghurt, we also serve this wonderful yoghurt with breakfast specials we do throughout the month. This yogurt goes so well with our homemade granola and muesli and anything really!

Paris Creek Products are a key component to our daily service, we go through quite a lot of milk for a little cafe!

You have such a large community presence; how has your café been recognised and how do you engage with the East-side community?

Every year we enter the East Side Business Awards which have been running for the past 3 years now. We are proud to say consecutively in 2020 and 2021 we have won Best Coffee in the East Side Business Awards and we were also nominated and made the finals for the Best Café Award in 2021!

Paris Creek Farms milk was always used in the preparation of our coffee for the awards judging. The awards are voted based on a popular vote which comes from our fantastic regulars who love our coffee. However, it also goes to a panel of experts who come in and try your products and then deliberate over the best coffee and cast their vote. We think this is a great system, as if it was just based on popular vote alone it may swing in favour of larger cafes due to the sheer volume of traffic, so we feel they have really analysed the coffee for the quality product that it is. We are very proud of this!

We believe the recognition is a testament to our branding and business philosophy, ensuring we always use locally sourced and quality ingredients. We focus on key and quality ingredients, for example we use Claire Valley free range eggs, Barossa Valley bacon, a local Parade bakery for bread and of course Bio-dynamic Organic products from Paris Creek Farms in the Adelaide Hills.

Why do you love to support local?

The world has changed a lot in the last 18 months, and we feel strongly about supporting our local suppliers now more than ever. We try and use local products wherever possible and create seasonal specials to capture these products in their best light. Buy local, support local is a huge trend recently and one we have always been on board with, but especially through the COVID-19 pandemic with a lot of businesses hurting. We know it is equally as important to South Aussies to buy and support local wherever possible. Not only that the quality of the produce we have in SA is second to none, it really underpins our menu in every way.

What makes Paris Creek Farms Milk so great for barista made coffee?

We like to think of an analogy when explaining this; it’s like when you go and buy yourself a really nice piece of steak for dinner, you don’t go for a cheap cut you go for a premium, well produced and texturized piece of meat knowing you will enjoy it more. This is similar to milk, as a barista I can tell the quality of a milk when I pour it into the jug. Paris Creek Farms Bio-Dynamic Cream on Top Milk is beautiful to work with for coffee, it’s very creamy due to the quality.

I’ve been a barista for 18 years and can confidently say Paris Creek Farms Bio-Dynamic Cream on Top Milk is easily the best milk I’ve used to produce a quality coffee every time. It’s a point of difference for us.  

The fact that we can turn around and point to the fridge behind the counter and the rection from customers when they see the easily recognisable Cream on Top Milk is; “fantastic, I know I’ll get a good cup of coffee”. That is definitely down to the milk and of course knowing what you’re doing on the coffee machine too. If people can see that the products you are using are high quality, they will always be pleased.

Pave is open from Tuesday – Sunday 7:30am – 3:00pm, 138b The Parade, Norwood SA 5067

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