Sweet Spot Cafe

Sweet Spot is a cafe and dessert bar at 56 North West Arm Road, Gymea, a short hop off the main village strip in the Sutherland Shire. It opens 6:30am on weekdays and 7am on weekends, running to mid-afternoon, and splits its personality down the middle: coffee and bacon and egg rolls at the front of the day, Dole Whip and sundaes at the back of it.

The dog setup

Dogs join you at the front footpath tables, which sit on a residential stretch of North West Arm Road and are noticeably calmer than the Gymea Bay Road strip a couple of minutes away. Keep your dog on a lead and close to the table, and bring your own water bowl to be safe, as bowls are not always out. It is a good fit for smaller or quieter dogs who would find the main village footpath traffic a lot.

Worth knowing

The signature order is the Dole Whip soft serve, a dairy-free and gluten-free pineapple or mango whip modelled on the Hawaiian theme-park original, and the dessert bar side runs sundaes, floats and milkshakes alongside locally roasted Shire coffee. The food menu covers all-day breakfast, burgers and acai bowls, and there is a kids play area indoors, so the deck can get lively with families on weekend afternoons. Weekend afternoons are when the dessert menu is the point; weekday mornings are the calm window for a dog at the footpath.

Getting there and parking

Street parking runs along North West Arm Road and the surrounding residential streets, and it is generally easier to find here than around the main Gymea Bay Road strip.

Close by with the dogs

For a proper off-leash run after a footpath lunch, the Helena Street Park Fenced Dog Park at Kirrawee is about five minutes away, fully fenced with separate large and small dog sections under the Sutherland Shire Council dog park program. On the water side, Carina Bay Dog Park at Oyster Bay pairs open grass with water access for a splash, and east towards Cronulla the Greenhills Beach dog off-lead area allows dogs on the sand outside the daytime restrictions, before 10am and after 4pm. If you are making a cafe run of it, Bianchini's Gymea in the village also takes dogs at its outdoor tables.

More options are on the New South Wales dog friendly cafes guide and the Gymea destination page.

Pepsi: the footpath here is quiet enough for a nervous dog to actually settle. Time the visit for a weekday morning, let the puppuccino-sized crowd levels do the rest, and split a Dole Whip situation with the table.