Since it opened in 2017, Highroad has been known for its great coffee.
How could it not? It was originally run by the team behind the award-winning ONA Coffee.
But when the new management took over the Dickson eatery, they wanted it to be equally celebrated for its food - the next step of which is the introduction of a nighttime dining experience.
For one half of Highroad's new management team, Lachlan Exton, the move to offer all-day dining is a natural one as the space lends itself so nicely to a dinner service.
"Although breakfast and lunches are our core business at the moment, we'd love to recoin ourselves to not just be a brunch cafe. And with someone like Cho Yoon as chef, we can really move into that all-day eatery," says Exton, who previously owned Swirl Catering.
"We're keenly focused on building a community dining hub in Dickson, an elegant and interesting food experience where classic French technique meets modern Australian.
"Our passion for hospitality rather than just service means we're intentionally making our guests feel a certain way with old-fashioned warm welcomes, soft lighting, food and wine pairing and creating an environment people want to dress up for in Dickson."
From Thursday, the Dickson eatery will be dishing out its winter menu, along with local wines and cocktails, on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, from 5.30pm. This is in addition to the breakfast and lunch menus it already hosts seven days a week.
With the food focus featuring local growers and producers, and an entirely Canberra region wine list, the new winter menu showcases contemporary French bistro cuisine combined with modern Australian and Asian influences.
It's a menu that's designed to be shared, whether it's a dish or two to be enjoyed over a glass of wine, or the full-service meal right through to dessert.
"When I designed the menu, I didn't want it to look like a restaurant menu with separate entree, main and dessert sections in the traditional way," Yoon said.
"I wanted to make it something that you can share and you can just put it on the table and eat as much as you want.
"Because there's a lot of people who just want to come and sit down after a meal, and grab some dessert and a glass of wine.
"That's the kind of vibe that we are aiming for."
Having grown up in Korea, and trained professionally with classic French techniques, Yoon's menu is a blend of the two - while being a nod to the Asian-influenced restaurant culture that Dickson is known for.
A highlight on the menu would have to be the prawns with nori pesto - so good that Highroad could quite easily sell it by the jar.
"I wanted to use the classic French techniques with the Asian influence on the flavour and the prawn dish is an example of that," Yoon says.
"The nori pesto is a very European technique, but using the nori gives the seaweed flavour and we also use some of the gochujang, which is Korean chilli paste, melted down with some butter and put on the prawn.
"So you can taste the Western food but there's the Asian flavours in there as well."
