With its inner city vibe and kick arse carrot cake, The Baron café and small bar is exactly what Castle Hill needed.

If you aren’t from the Hills area you probably don’t visit Castle Hill all that often. Now you have a reason to.

Just like us here at Spit, the guys behind Castle Hill’s coolest hangout wanted to try something new, so they opened a café and small bar on the main street. It’s certainly proving a wise decision!

The Baron is open daily from 7:30am and also opens for dinner or a drink on Friday and Saturday nights. The atmosphere is chilled, the staff are young and super friendly and the food and coffee are both awesome. Together with good music, communal tables and rustic, mix-matched décor, The Baron could easily be mistaken for an inner city haunt and it is unlike anything else in the area.

The food is affordable and well presented and they’ve got a substantial range of beer, wine and cider plus they even serve mulled wine. As for their sweet treats, well, I can safely say I love them all but the carrot cake is definitely a winner. Seriously, I would knock women and children out of the way just to get my hands on a slice.

Over a skim cap, I had a chat with Ricky, one the guys behind my new local, and asked him a few quick questions about how The Baron came to be…

When did you guys open?

Early December

Three of you own this place right?

Yep…Matt, Mike and myself. I’m Ricky.

I believe you three are friends. What’s it like working with your buddies?

It’s good. It’s actually really fun.

Do you fight?

No, not really. Well, we haven’t yet. People say it’s hard to do business with friends but I don’t understand that. We haven’t had an argument yet. We get annoyed with each other but I guess we’d do that anyway.

Had you guys worked in cafes before?

No, none of us have ever worked in a café before. We were just having dinner one night and decided we wanted to open a café and a bar so we did.

So what did you all do before opening The Baron?

I am a project manager, Mike was in logistics and Matt’s a fabricator so he builds things.

That’s quite a change. How does it feel to give up what you do and start something completely different?

It’s fun! I guess we enjoy it so it’s all good.

Are you from around here?

Yep, we all grew up in the Hills.

Do you guys work out everything on the menu yourselves?

Yeah we meet up with our chef and work it out. We’re currently making our spring menu so we’ll be sitting down and working out some things that we like and things that we hate and trialling a few ideas before we launch it.

What’s your favourite thing on the menu?

Oh, I don’t know. I like the Ploughman’s Board but I like the all the menu.

*If you’re wondering why there isn’t a photo of the carrot cake below, it’s because not once could I wait long enough before eating to take a quick snap. It’s that good.