On the main street of Lumsden, halfway between Queenstown and Bluff, is Roasted x Toasted, part café, part roastery, part retail nook, and entirely its own thing.
This is the home of ROAR Coffee, roasted on site by Kelly, who you’ll usually find behind the counter, calling out a name or checking a grinder. She’s not one for small talk if there’s a line at the till, but stick around long enough and she’ll chat to you like you’ve been turning up for years. Maybe that’s why people do. From down the road or two hours away, they come in for a coffee and a toastie and the kind of stop that feels a bit like visiting someone’s really well-stocked bach kitchen.
The menu reads like someone had a bit of fun: the Hamsome One, Mother Clucker, Corn Star. Proper toasties, generous and golden, never too clever for their own good. There are sell-out specials on the weekend and last year, one of them made the finals of the national toastie competition. Not that Kelly’s one to bang on about it. "It’s just a sandwich."
But that’s Kelly. She’s always underselling what she’s doing, even when it’s quietly shaping the food story of the South. ROAR Coffee began because she wanted Southland to have a coffee brand to call its own – something consistent, freshly roasted, and not trying to be anything it’s not. "We are special, not specialty," she says. It’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but also a pretty accurate summary.
The beans come from Guatemala and Colombia via a broker she's worked with for nearly a decade. The roast is tweaked until it’s just right, and every week, it’s done again. There are now dozens of cafés and lodges across the region using ROAR – some with refillable tins and waste-free setups, which is the kind of detail most customers never see. Doesn’t matter. That’s not why she does it.
There’s a retail shelf full of good local stuff, Josie’s pickled onions from Gore, salami from Gathered Game, quirky fly fishing flies, the kind of pottery you wish you’d bought last time you were there. Some of it changes, some of it’s always there. Like the dead animals (not the food, the taxidermy), the neon, the sound of the grinder kicking in again.
It’s a place that you plan your trip around. Time it for lunch. Or brunch. Or elevensies. Stop, it’s worth the hype.
