The Chef Who Shows Up at 2am — and Why It Shows

Inside The Baker's Duck, the Toowoomba bakery rewriting expectations about regional food

The croissants come out before most of the city has woken up.

By the time the first customers push through the door at The Baker's Duck, Executive Chef Millie Dunn and her team of twenty have already been at work for hours — laminating dough, proofing loaves, portioning custard, building the day. It's routine. It's relentless. And, according to Dunn, that's exactly the point.

"Every customer is experiencing your product for the first time," she says. "It doesn't matter if you've made that croissant a thousand times before. It's their first impression. Maintaining that standard and that mindset every day — that's what separates a good baker from a great one."

That standard has been noticed. This year The Baker's Duck has been named Best Bakery in Queensland by Queenslanders as part of an initiative by the Queensland Government — a recognition that Dunn sees as something larger than a single award for a single business.

"Awards like this help put Toowoomba on the map," she says. "They shine a light on what's happening in the region as a whole. There's a perception that the best food experiences only come out of major cities — but that hasn't been my experience. I've spent my career working in regional areas and some of the best food, hospitality and talent I've seen has come from regional communities."

Dunn didn't take a traditional path into pastry. She more or less fell into hospitality after school and, as she puts it, never left. A lot of what she knows was learned the hard way — through trial and error, observation and the people she worked alongside. For a long time, she wished someone had simply handed her the answers. Looking back, she's glad they didn't.

"Having to work things out for myself gave me something equally valuable," she reflects. "It forced me to develop intuition. I learned not just to follow a recipe or a process but to understand what was happening in front of me and adapt when things didn't go to plan."

That instinct for problem-solving is central to how she now leads her team. On a given morning, a bad day at The Baker's Duck looks nothing like what most people imagine. It's rarely a queue out the door, or a cabinet running low. It's a missed delivery. An equipment failure. A mistake embedded in a batch three days earlier, surfacing only now — too late to fix.

"In baking, a lot of products take multiple days to produce," she explains. "Something as simple as forgetting the yeast in the dough can result in hundreds of products being lost days later. What makes those situations difficult isn't just the financial cost or the lost production. It's the human side of it. Every product passes through multiple sets of hands, and every person in the team is doing their best."

The business currently serves around 10,000 products each week. Sustaining that output with any degree of care requires infrastructure most customers never see — the planning, the systems, the staff schedules, the carefully written product specifications. Dunn describes it with characteristic directness.

"The magic people see in the cabinet is supported by a huge amount of work that most customers never see. That's not a complaint — it's just the reality of producing quality food consistently. The creativity is the fun part, but it's the systems, planning and people behind it that make it possible."

On the current winter menu, the most technically involved item might surprise you. It's not the most elaborate pastry in the cabinet — it's the custard danish.

"We freeze our custard in portions before placing it into the pastry," Dunn explains, "and getting that right took a lot of refinement. There needs to be enough custard to create a balanced product but not so much that it bursts during baking. The custard and the pastry also need to bake at the same rate, so you end up with a fully baked croissant and a perfectly set custard at exactly the same time."

She pauses. "It sounds simple. But there are a lot of variables involved."

It's the kind of precision that defines the bakery's approach — and it extends to the products customers most often overlook. When asked what on the menu is underrated, Dunn doesn't hesitate.

"The plain croissant and the pain au chocolat," she says. "There's no filling, glaze or garnish to distract from the quality of the pastry itself. Our croissants are made using a semi-sourdough process and include spelt flour, which gives them a deeper flavour and a subtle nuttiness. Sometimes the products that deserve the most attention are the ones people walk past every day."

Her personal pick from the current menu — the Poached Jasmine Pear and Almond Tart — is, she concedes, very much a reflection of her own tastes: seasonal, balanced, ingredient-driven. But she's quick to draw a line between personal preference and professional purpose.

"Creating products for a bakery isn't always about creating what I personally want to eat. You have to create products that customers will love. There are products on our menu that I probably wouldn't choose for myself, but I'm still incredibly proud of them."

Ask Dunn what distinguishes a great bakery from a merely good one, and she gives an answer that has less to do with technique than with values.

"Greatness comes from respect," she says. "For the ingredients, for the craft, for the suppliers, for the team and for the customer. A great bakery is intentional about every ingredient that goes into it. Better ingredients cost more, but they also yield a better result."

That philosophy has shaped the bakery's sourcing approach — local milk, local eggs, quality butter, seasonal produce — and it has shaped how Dunn builds her team.

"You can teach skills and techniques," she says, "but it's much harder to teach someone to care."

Of everything that happens at The Baker's Duck, Dunn says the thing she's most proud of — the thing customers never see — is what happens to the people who work there.

"Our team is relatively young, and many of our chefs are still in the early stages of their careers. Watching someone who once needed constant guidance become confident and capable in their own right — that's incredibly rewarding. The apprentice who used to ask a hundred questions can suddenly run a section independently."

She pauses again, and this time the words carry a little more weight.

"Customers see the pastry in the cabinet. They don't see the growth, the effort, the habits and the teamwork that made it possible. For me, that's what I'm most proud of."

A second Baker's Duck is planned to open in Toowoomba later this year — a sign of confidence in both the brand and the region. It is growth built, Dunn insists, on the same foundation as the first: quality, consistency, and a refusal to cut corners where corners matter.

Hospitality is hard work. Dunn has never pretended otherwise — in fact, she seems almost suspicious of anyone who would. The hours are long before the city stirs. The margin for error is small. And yet she keeps coming back to the same word, the same quiet measure of a career spent doing something well.

"If you can find satisfaction in the process, the routine and the pursuit of doing something well every day," she says, "that's where the real reward is."

For better or worse — and by most measures, it's better — Millie Dunn is exactly where she's supposed to be.

The Baker's Duck is based in Toowoomba, Queensland. A second store is scheduled to open in late 2026.