How Espresso Coffee
Came to Sydney

People ask sometimes why a Hungarian restaurant is called 21 Espresso. The address explains the 21. The coffee explains everything else.

When John Schiffer arrived in Sydney in the late 1950s, he brought more than recipes and an eye for outdoor dining. He brought an understanding of coffee that was completely foreign to the city he had landed in. And in short order, he did something that very few people in Australia had done before him. He set up an espresso machine.

What Sydney Was Drinking
Before Espresso

To understand what this meant, you have to understand the state of coffee in Australia in 1958. It was, by almost any measure, dire. The country ran on tea. Coffee, when it was served, was almost universally instant — a spoonful of powder dissolved in hot water and lightened with tinned milk. In the few establishments that brewed it, the result was typically a weak, bitter extract that bore little resemblance to the drink Europeans had been perfecting for two centuries.

This was not the result of indifference. It was simply a matter of exposure. Australia's post war migration had brought new food cultures, new cuisines, and new expectations. But coffee culture — the deep, ritual culture of the Italian and Central European café, where a small cup of something intensely aromatic was a daily act of pleasure — had not yet arrived in any meaningful way.

Espresso machines existed in Italy and in the Hungarian coffee houses John had grown up with. The technology had been refined since the 1940s. The lever machines of the early 1950s — heavy, beautiful pieces of engineering that forced pressurised hot water through finely ground coffee — were producing something categorically different from anything available in Sydney. Something concentrated and complex and finished with a layer of golden crema that existed nowhere else in the world of coffee.

"For John, coffee was not a beverage. It was a ritual, a signal of civilisation, a reason to sit down and stay a while. He could not understand why Sydney had not discovered this yet."

The Machine That
Changed Everything

Setting up an espresso machine in Australia in the late 1950s was not a simple undertaking. The machines were Italian, expensive, and required sourcing through channels that were far less accessible than they are today. The logistics of getting one to Sydney, installing it, and then obtaining the quality coffee beans needed to use it properly involved a level of commitment that went well beyond novelty.

John made it happen. The machine arrived at 21 Knox Street and with it came something new to Double Bay — a proper espresso. Small, dark, intensely flavoured, finished with crema. Served at the counter or, once the terrace was open, outside in the sun.

The combination was immediately compelling. The alfresco tables were somewhere to sit. The espresso was the reason to linger. The two ideas were inseparable from the beginning, and together they created something Double Bay had not seen before: a genuine European café experience, transplanted intact to a suburb on Sydney Harbour.

Word spread quickly. In a city where the alternatives were instant coffee indoors, the offer at 21 Knox Street was remarkable. People came for the coffee. They stayed for the food. They came back because of how it all felt — the open air, the small cup, the sense of being somewhere that understood what a good morning or afternoon could be.

The Parallel Between
Espresso and the Schnitzel

There is a connection worth drawing here that runs deeper than coincidence. Both espresso and the schnitzel — the two things that defined 21 Espresso from its earliest days — are exercises in the same underlying discipline. They look simple. They have very few ingredients or components. And they are extraordinarily sensitive to the quality of decisions made in their preparation.

Espresso is water, pressure, ground coffee, and time. Change any one variable carelessly and the result collapses. The grind too coarse and the extraction is thin and sour. Too fine and it chokes and turns bitter. The temperature a degree too high and the crema breaks down. A great espresso is not complicated, but it demands a precision that most people underestimate until they try to produce one consistently.

The schnitzel is meat, crumb, and heat. The same principle applies exactly. The meat must be the right cut, properly prepared. The crumb must be fresh and evenly applied. The fat must be at precisely the right temperature, maintained throughout cooking. A great schnitzel is the result of doing a small number of things exactly right, every time, without exception.

John understood both. He understood that mastery of simple things is harder than complexity, and more worth having. The restaurant he built was an expression of that understanding. It was not trying to be elabourate. It was trying to be correct — to produce a coffee, a schnitzel, a strudel, a goulash, at a standard that could not be improved upon, and to serve it to people sitting outside in the Sydney sunshine.

Where Australian Coffee
Went From Here

The story of espresso in Australia is, in the decades that followed, a story of Italian migration to Melbourne and Sydney. The great espresso bars of Lygon Street and the inner suburbs of Sydney were established through the 1950s and 1960s by Italian immigrants who understood the machine and the ritual. From those beginnings, Australian coffee culture grew into something that is now internationally recognised — the flat white, the third wave café movement, the obsessive attention to single origin beans and extraction variables that defines specialty coffee today.

Australia went from a country that drank instant coffee to a country that teaches the world how to make espresso. That transformation took roughly 60 years and began, in part, with the decisions of a small number of people who arrived here from Europe and refused to accept that things could not be better.

John Schiffer was one of them. The machine he ran, the coffee he served, the tables he put outside — these were not grand gestures. They were simply a refusal to settle for less than he knew was possible.

The Name on the
Door

21 Espresso. The address and the coffee. The two things that made the place what it was from the beginning. The name was not chosen for atmosphere or branding. It was simply a description of what was there: a café at number 21, serving espresso in a city that had never really encountered it before.

The restaurant has grown considerably since then. The menu now runs to over 30 dishes. The terrace that was revolutionary in 1958 is now simply expected. Espresso is available on every corner in Double Bay and on most corners in Sydney. The world John walked into and quietly transformed does not look the same as it did.

But the coffee is still on the menu at 21 Knox Street. And it is still made properly. Some things do not need to change.