In Old Guildford, a suburb in Sydney’s west, there’s a small cafe open until midnight called Caffeine Hit. It’s a fair walk from the main strip, in a mainly residential area, with a bottle shop next door and an Arabic church across the road. It doesn’t have a flashy dining room, a fancy menu or a famous chef, but there’s often an evening queue outside. Everyone is there to get one thing: acai.
Not the health-focused, brunch acai (pronounced ah-sigh-ee) bowls of Bondi or Byron, but an oddly erect tower of acai soft serve so abundantly slathered in peanut butter, pistachio sauce or liquid Biscoff, it’s hardly recognisable as the Amazonian berry marketed as a “superfood”. It’s like eating a particularly soft, faintly berry-flavoured sorbet. If it wasn’t for its suit of liquid, nutty sweetness, it would be inoffensive and unexciting.
