Tahlia, queen of tarts

After an apprenticeship in Sydney’s best restaurants, Tahlia Hagege has found her true love - pastry. AVIVA LOWY devours the secrets behind her stunning sweets.

“There’s dark chocolate ganache with salted caramel, passionfruit and coconut with meringue, white chocolate cream with summer berries… ” Market stall-holder Tahlia Hagege is running through the list of enticing flavours to help a customer make the difficult choice from the table of jewel-like savoury and sweet tarts.

In a city where people queue for hours to get their hands on the latest pastry “thing” - think Lode in Sydney or Lune in Melbourne - it’s hard to believe that you can rock right up to a local market and be munching one of the best without waiting longer than it takes to make up your mind.

Until Hagege took her wares to market just over two years ago, you would have been more likely to find her in the kitchen of one of Sydney’s more toney establishments. Her previous gig was as head pastry chef at the luxury QT hotel in the city, but just six weeks into that job, “Covid hit, and we all went home. They shut the restaurant.”

During her three months of pandemic leave, “I started doing my own thing”, and before it was time to return, she’d created Dolce Tahlia. As an open-air market patisserie - showcasing at Double Bay (Thursdays) and Kings Cross (Saturdays) - the venture was less likely to end up a Covid casualty.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Well before Hagege established herself as the queen of tarts, she was an ex-Moriah student, enjoying a gap year in Israel with no idea about what career to pursue. . .

“When I finished school I went straight to Israel, learnt Hebrew and worked in an English-speaking kindergarten for about nine months. Every Friday, I used to go to Shuk Ha’Carmel, the market in Tel Aviv, with this massive trolley and carry all these bags of delicious fruit and vegetables that you’d get for peanuts. Over the weekend, I’d cook feasts. I’ve always brought friends together and cooked for them. It’s a really big part of who I am”, says Hagege.