Little & Friday Ponsonby

Overview

The newest addition to the high achieving Little & Friday family is nestled between picturesque colonial homes on Ponsonby’s Douglas Street where Good One used to reside. The café’s forefront is so unassuming you’d almost miss it on your suburban stroll of not for the babble of voices spilling from its open windows out onto the otherwise tranquil pavement.

A visit to Little & Friday on Douglas Street can feel a lot like a soothing visit to your someone’s mum’s house. Not your mum's necessarily, but one of those impossibly hip and young mums who buy industrial-style lofts and furnish them with quirky accessories in accenting colours.

The slick, whitewashed space is peppered with tables, window benches and even a scattering of wooden stumps a la your local school playground for diners to sprawl across and huddle around. Even with the espresso machine in the middle of the floor adding to the hum of the place, Little & Friday Ponsonby manages to be simultaneously bustling and spacious - the perfect spot to clear your head or fill it up again, with people watching a plenty.

Everything here tastes just about as decadent as it looks, yet whole ingredients and an abundance of vegetables mean that you and your new food-baby will probably leave feeling wholesome and virtuous, if not a little bit spoiled.

Although Little & Friday offers a variety of tantalizing options on their menu, it’s the cabinet food that really makes you salivate. All the Little & Friday stores across Auckland city boast a dazzling, food porn-esque selection of beautiful sandwiches and powdered donuts, but it was here in Ponsonby that I was finally able to delve into their selection of pretty cakes.

The banana and caramel cake and the gluten-free baci cake were both worth their respective $7, which really means a lot coming from someone who is often reluctant to spend more than a fiver on anything, ever. The former was rich and creamy topped with caramelized walnut (attention to detail that I, a massive walnut fan, appreciated immensely) and the latter was the dreamy love child of cake and a Ferrero Rocher. So damn good.

If a chilled-out, chic atmosphere and super sexy food isn’t enough to convince you that Ponsonby’s Little & Friday is worth a stroll to, consider the fact that instead of table numbers these guys use blue-painted plastic animals. It was the cerulean coloured brontosaurus and panda figurines spattered throughout the place that earned this particular Little & Friday family member a permanent spot on my adorable Auckland café radar… and that’s a very prestigious place to be.