Rachel, The Lydiard General Cafe {Ballarat Hidden Lanes Self Guided Tour}

My name is Rachel Sheehan and I'm the owner of Lydia General. I'd had a bit of time off work, was looking for something to do, had had business previously, loved to interact with people and this came across my Facebook page as a business that was for sale. The location was amazing, the parking was really good for Ballarat and it just happened to be the right fit for me and my family at the time that we decided to go ahead and buy it. And probably the one thing that people comment on is how we make the customer feel when we're here. Coming into the cafe to me, we tried to create an environment that was like coming into a house and sitting at the kitchen table. So we make a point of getting to know people's names, their dogs' names, just I suppose a familiar environment that's just really comfortable to be in. I think COVID made the Ballarat locals realise how important it is to keep business in Ballarat and that if we don't support local businesses, then they just won't be here. So for us to be a local business, we want to have that follow through so that we're supporting other local businesses in the produce and the products that we use. So on the menu, yeah, so we sell a lot of eggs, so meal book, free range eggs. We do local bacon, local chorizo, local ham. I suppose our coffees and our chai's are from Melbourne, but that's still fairly local. We use Grounded Pleasures chai and hot chocolate, so that's the local Ballarat brand. Beautiful product. What else do we sell? In our gift section, jewellery that's locally produced. So you're probably getting scissors made by a lady called Tegan. So we're located in Soldiers Hill. We're a destination store, so we're sort of a store in the middle of a neighbourhood. And that neighbourhood supports us really well. Fabulous for us is that we're just a stone's throw from the railway station. So people coming up from Melbourne on the train, they hop off the train and we're just across the road from the railway station. There's a new Quest Apartments across the road. There's a lot of business up this end of town. It's just a really beautiful, very picturesque, just a really beautiful area to be in. We're very dog friendly. So I suppose people just bringing their dogs, dogs that escape from the leashes on the outside and you turn around and there's dogs running around on the inside of the cafe. I suppose it's not really ideal. But also a lot of people find the old newspapers on the wall a bit of a novelty. People will come in and spend ages reading the old articles. So there's old couriers back from the 50s. There's age, the sun. There's always a bit of a hit. It's funny, every now and then you'll get somebody who actually knows, somebody who's in some of the pictures. A lot of people ask if it's like wallpaper, but it's the real papers from the day. So they've kept quite well. I think it's really important to know what's been here previously to get to where we are today. So out in the back room we've actually got eight shop front pictures of what it's been throughout its time. And people ask the history of the building. So that's very interesting. So it started off as a confectioner and general grocery store. The amount of people who come into the store to see what we've done different to the owner before. And a lot of older people who come in and tell their stories from when they used to come into the business when they were little kids. It's really interesting. It was a green grocer. The original building did burn down at one particular point in time. It's been a milk bar. I think uni students rented it out and lived in the shop front for a little while. What else has it been? It's been like a commercial cake business. It's been a cat cafe where you could come and have a cup of coffee and pat a cat at the same time. It was a local previous to us being here which was just a cafe. It's a mostly general store which is the name of the business that we've picked. Sort of reflects back on the history of I suppose the building itself.