This past summer I was in Sydney, Australia as part of a school program that placed me on an internship exchange. Two months, which outside of college and home is longer than I have ever stayed anywhere abroad, so new things and experiences were bound to happen.

I got to do the things you go to Sydney to do. Opera House, petting kangaroos, WFB (work from beach) days, coastal walks, hikes, a lot of very good food. And I met a surprising number of people who, on hearing I was American, would immediately bring up Trump and want to tell me exactly what they thought of him. The other thing they wanted to talk about was American fast food, which they were far more curious about than I expected. Those two subjects came up more than anything else.

Usually when I travel it's a week or two at most, and I notice myself rushing. There's a list of sights and buildings a place is known for and I try to get through it, and I always leave with the feeling that I missed something. I think a big part of that is never getting past basic pleasantries with anyone who actually lives there. You see the city, but you don't root yourself in any of the lives or businesses inside it.

Two months was finally long enough to do that, and it happened through one shop in particular.

Finding it

My roommate is a serious coffee person. On his first day in Sydney he wandered into a small café on Clarence Street in the CBD, tried what they were making, and came back insisting I go with him. He was right. It was genuinely some of the best coffee either of us had had, and the menu had things on it neither of us had seen anywhere else.

The shop was called Offset x D, and it was one guy: Finn. We got talking, found out he was Chinese too, and spent a good part of that first conversation practicing our Chinese with him, which he was patient about. He told us the place had only opened about a month earlier, and that he had nearly ended up somewhere else entirely. The day before he was due to sign a lease on a different site, which happened to be Chinese New Year's Eve, Otto from Danes Coffee Roasters called to say this Clarence Street space was coming free and the landlord wanted someone who could actually run it, and after a few meetings he took it instead.

Inside Offset x D, Finn behind the counter
Finn, who owns Offset x D. Fifteen years in coffee before this, starting as a barista, then running his own venues, then consulting, most recently Kin Cafe in Lane Cove. At that point he was running this whole room himself.

As we kept talking he was open about where things stood. He had ambitions for the place, but it was a one-man operation and business was slow. He showed us the website he had at the time, a stock template that didn't say when he was open, where he was, or anything about the coffee. It had never taken a single online order.

Doing something about it

Using some of the skills I had picked up building my own website, I naturally offered to rebuild it, thinking it would be an easy enough process on my end.

What it looks like now: offsetxd.pages.dev.

Playing around initially with Claude, I was never satisfied with the AI slop it generated, so I scoured online for coffee shops and their websites for inspiration. That's when I found Land to Sea, a coffee shop based in Brooklyn. I loved their more minimalist look, and the fact they had a video overlay on the site to show off the interior and vibe of the shop. I wanted to do something similar.

Neither of us was free during the day. We both had our own internships in Sydney to show up for, so this happened in the evenings and on weekends. What we settled into was coming into the shop about once a week, sitting down with Finn, showing him what had changed and what was working, and hearing what he'd been up to on his end. He almost always had something new he was testing, so we'd end up trying whatever he was cooking that week and adding it to the online menu as an update.

A barista pouring latte art into a black cup at the Offset bar
Some weeks I came in just to film. Most of the footage on the site is from those visits.

Throughout the course of the summer the weekly visits repeated, and we found ourselves becoming really good friends with him, taking us around in his car to coffee shops way out of Sydney that he personally really enjoyed, which I think is the highest compliment.

Most of what I remember is not the work. It is how much of his thinking I ended up hearing. What actually goes into operating a place like that day to day, handling the utilities and the finances, working out his margins on anything he makes, given he'll always be cooking up something new to experiment with. How he decided what went on the menu, what he would spend money on and what he would not, why he had the grinders he had and not the cheaper ones, what was worrying him that week. On a shorter trip I would have been a customer in that room for ten minutes.

His sales grew by about thirty percent over those two months, between the new food items and finally having online ordering and a site that told people where he was.

Offset x D opened on 11 May 2026 at 171 Clarence Street, Sydney, and is online at offsetxd.pages.dev. If you're in the CBD, get the 2084. Jason Fang, 2026