It's just past dawn in peaceful art-deco Murwillumbah where an early-morning queue has formed outside a tiny hole-in-the-wall bakery at the trendy end of town. There are plenty of skilled technicians in the pastry world but few of them are magicians like Ben Leonardi.
His glass display cases are a creative playground of mind-blowingly delicious pastries, some of which, paradoxically, emerged from the catastrophe of Covid when the Frenchman decided to teach himself new skills as a chef and pâtissier in lockdown. Ben's crisp, buttery perfections come with a caution. Beware the man who creates such unforgettable emotions in dough that you will spend the rest of your life trying to rediscover the sensation somewhere else. His Jesuit almond croissants are the springboard that catapult us forward on a road trip that's a food-lover's odyssey in a forgotten corner of the country.
The Northern Rivers region of New South Wales is a culinary destination made lush with rainfall, but it was devastated by the floods of 2022 that, literally, blew records out of the water. To outsiders like us, the
