About
One room, two moods
Most places on a campus pick a side: coffee shop or bar. LAB runs as both, and the switch happens at 3pm.
The name is a nod to where it sits. Kambri is the middle of a research university, and the room borrows that language — measuring, testing, adjusting — and applies it to coffee and food rather than chemistry.
The coffee
LAB pours ONA Coffee, a Canberra roaster with a serious competition record. The staff are happy to talk through what's in the grinder and why it tastes the way it does, which is the point: the bar is meant to be somewhere you can ask a question about your flat white without it being a whole thing.
The kitchen
Brunch is cooked on site each day, built around fresh, seasonal and largely wholefood ingredients — the reasoning being that food in season needs less done to it. In practice that means a menu that leans green and generous, with vegan and gluten-free versions of most dishes rather than one token option at the bottom of the page.
The bar
From 3pm the taps open and the kitchen moves to bar food: burgers on Nur's buns, loaded fries, popcorn chicken. The beer list runs from light lagers through to full-bodied ales and dark stouts, with a rotating selection on draught.
Two locations
The original is at Kambri on the ANU campus, surrounded by parkland and exercise areas, with enough outdoor seating to make the most of a clear Canberra morning. A second room operates at Narellan Place in the city. Both are listed with hours and contact details on the visit page.
About this site
This is an unsolicited redesign built as a university coursework exercise — an independent student project, not an official LAB ANU product and not affiliated with the business.
The existing site puts its photography first and its practical information last: opening hours, both addresses, the phone number and the entire menu live inside scanned image PDFs, which means they can't be searched, can't be selected or copied, don't reflow on a phone, and are invisible to a screen reader. Every internal link also opens in a new tab, which quietly breaks the back button.
This version changes the order of operations. The same information is written directly into the pages as text, the navigation stays in one tab, and the layout is built for a phone first. Nothing here is meant to replace the official site — go there for anything current.