A Korean-inspired Japanese sandwich - the sando - served alongside fancy coffee in a cavernous former auto-repair shop?
It's official: we have reached Peak Braddon.
On Lonsdale officially launched yesterday at 23 Lonsdale Street, serving up their specialty, a Korean-inspired sando.
And no, that's no Australian for sandwich, but a specific type of sandwich from parts of east Asia - particularly Japan and Korea - made with a special type of bread known as shokupan.
It's the latest venture from the team behind Highroad in Dickson, co-owned by Lachlan Exton and Maheer Prasad, with chef Cho Yoon.
The idea is to give Canberra food-lovers an alternative to what has become a very traditional hipster Aussie breakfast - think smashed avo or a bacon-and-egg roll - although Ona coffee will also feature on the menu.
It's the first time Ona will feature on the strip.
"This really is our point of difference - Korean-inspired sandos right here in Canberra," said Mr Exon yesterday.
Fillings are nothing like your average sanger, either, with cabbage and garlic jam, soft-fried sweet soy chicken, and panko-crumbed pork loin with tankatsu glaze.
It all feels very right on the site of what has gone down in Canberra lore as the 2009 Great Braddon Renaissance.
It's where Lonsdale Street Roasters began, yes, roasting coffee 15 years ago, before opening a cafe down the other end of the street at number 7.
The opening sparked a revival - or even a rebirth - in the otherwise nondescript pair of industrial streets on the edge of the city centre that had, since Canberra's earliest days, been populated mainly with caryards, mechanics and panel-beaters.
Until then, there had only been the old-school Civic Pub, the more upscale Debacle, which opened in the early 2000s, and fancy homewares store Unit Concepts.
Lonsdale Street Roasters kicked off a long and still evolving array of hip cafes, fancy restaurants and high-end shops, as well as any number of pop-ups, food vans and concept stores.
There to launch On Lonsdale yesterday, newly re-minted Chief Minister Andrew Barr joked, but only half in jest, that the street "didn't become cool" until he had left the vicinity as a resident and moved up the road to Dickson.
From about 2000 to 2007, he lived on nearby Fawkner Street, and met his now husband, Anthony Toms, at what was then the Meridian Club, in 2001.
But he was quick to point out that, as planning minister in the later noughties and early 2010s, he oversaw the rezoning of the area to enable the current stream of businesses to flourish.
And he agreed that a chic, industrial-style cafe selling Korean inspired sandos in what was once a panel beaters was, indeed, peak Braddon.
"That is indeed fair," he said.
He also oversaw the inclusion of the famous rainbow roundabout on Lonsdale Street after the laws changed to allow same-sex marriage in Australia.
He and Mr Toms are shortly to mark the 25th anniversary, on November 13, of their first meeting at what was then Canberra's main gay nightspot, the Meridian, on Mort Street a few blocks away.
It will be the same date on which they later marked their civil partnership ceremony in 2009 and, in 2019, their actual wedding.
But the morning was all about the not-so-humble sando now being served up on what had "become one of Canberra's destination streets", that he was never quite cool enough to live on.
- On Lonsdale is now open at 23 Lonsdale Street in Braddon.
