Melbourne’s Best Cafe Openings of 2020

For half of 2020 – a year plagued by stay-at-home orders, press conferences and seemingly eternal uncertainty – Melbourne’s cafes were closed for dine-in. The simple act of sitting down at your local with a morning coffee was off the cards. So, it’s no surprise this list is dominated by new spots serving comforting carbs in easily snatch-and-grabbable form. (To be honest, we could almost rename it “Melbourne’s Best Bakery Openings of 2020”.) Here are the cafes that impressed us most this year – serving everything from ooey-gooey Portuguese tarts, to fluffy loaves of shokupan (Japanese milk bread), to sweet-and-salty croissants, and beyond.

Missed our round-up of Melbourne’s best restaurant openings? Find it here.

All Are Welcome Thornbury
It’s only been three years since All Are Welcome arrived on Northcote’s High Street, but – if the constant queues are anything to go by – it’s fair to say it’s become one of Melbourne’s most popular bakeries. To keep up with demand, this winter owners Mark Free, Aaron Maxwell (both also of Everyday Coffee) and Boris Portnoy opened a second shop, also on High Street, but in Thornbury. The menu is near identical to its sibling’s, but at least now getting your hands on one of those pork-and-fennel sausage rolls or cheese-and-oregano pastries is a little less time-consuming.

Bakemono
In a beautifully converted laneway garage, tucked away off a buzzing part of Little Lonsdale Street, you’ll find this tiny Japanese-inspired bakery. It’s by the team behind cafe
Little Rogue, which is right across the street – nothing like a bit of sibling rivalry. The fit-out is all crisp whites and timber panelling, channelling the minimalist bakeries and cafes in Japan and Korea. It’s serving fluffy shokupan, pillowy canelé (small French cakes flavoured with rum), piles of pastries, and coffee by Small Batch. But, to avoid being met with “sold out” signs, get there mid-morning.

Bread Club
Unlike Fight Club, this is a club – the delightfully carby kind – that you should definitely be talking about. Two French bakers, whose CVs list Woodfrog, Vue de Monde and Baker D Chirico, opened the mint-green bakery on Queensberry Street in North Melbourne just before the madness of 2020 set in. On a snazzy green quartzite benchtop, there are stacks of sourdoughs, baguettes (as is, or stuffed with simple fillings), the usual pastry suspects, and more creative specialties – right now that includes panettone, rhubarb-y mince pies and gingerbread cookies.

Casa Nata
When there’s only one item on the menu, there’s nowhere to hide. It’s gotta be great. And at Thornbury’s dedicated house of tarts, Casa Nata, the pastéis de nata (Portuguese custard tarts) more than meet that brief. Flaky, custardy, expertly blistered – and with a touch of cinnamon. Perhaps the best part of this new arrival, though, is the fact you can watch the tarts being made in the slick open kitchen, then eat a couple straight out the oven (for maximum ooey-gooeyness).

Falco
This small-batch Collingwood bakery technically opened last December, in the former Rockwell and Sons site – just a few days after our wrap of the best cafe openings of 2019 was published. So, we honour it here, and with good reason. This place has pedigree; it’s from the team that gave us Fitzroy’s Bar Liberty and Italian diner Capitano. And its chicken-salad and just-salad sandwiches have garnered something of a cult following in the Broadsheet office, which is – conveniently – just down the road.

Monforte Viennoiserie
An All Are Welcome pastry chef is behind this pint-sized, hole-in-the-wall patisserie on Canning Street in Carlton North. And, as at All Are Welcome, socially distanced queues became the norm when it opened during lockdown 2.0. In a two-by-five-metre space, UK-born Giorgia McAllister Forte runs the one-woman show, baking everything herself – from sweet-and-salty croissants, to hazelnut pains au chocolat, and asparagus and goat’s curd pastries. And just in case you needed an extra incentive to get in early and avoid missing out: there are croissant loyalty cards; your eighth is free.

Nico’s Sandwich Deli
This blue-and-white, takeaway-only sandwich and coffee shop – from Tom Peasnell, one of the guys responsible for Peaches, Cheek, Dexter, Takeaway Pizza and Kenny Lover – opened in a CBD laneway for just one day before Melbourne descended into lockdown 2.0. But in November it popped up in Fitzroy, on the corner of Brunswick and Kerr Streets, where it’ll be until the team heads back to the city in March. Go for herby Italo-Japanese sangas; Cubanos with smoky pork belly; “dirty but fresh” Chilean hotdogs; and brisket-and-pork meatball subs with bone marrow and hearty smoked cannellini-bean sugo. Plus, batch-brew and espresso coffee by Seven Seeds.

Ona
This is Broadsheet’s most-read cafe-opening story of the year. In June, something pretty special started brewing in a backstreet off Sydney Road in Brunswick – one of the country’s best coffee roasters, the Canberra-born Ona, had launched its first Melbourne outpost. And it well and truly hit the ground running, with a boundary-pushing menu of 20 coffees and one cup – made with rare, topnotch beans – that came with a $25.50 price tag. It’s a cafe that treats coffee almost like wine. Owner Sasa Sestic told us at the time, “We’re looking for that menu to grow to 40, 50, 60 coffees, so you can choose not only the coffee you like, but to compare vintages as well.”

Raya
“Unqualified baker and shaker”. That’s how Raymond Tan, an accounting graduate turned Insta-famous baker (who’s amassed a following of more than 260,000 people), describes himself. After taking online orders for brightly coloured cakes and cake pops for years, he finally opened a warmly lit, Malaysian-inspired cake shop-slash-cafe in the CBD in 2020. Stop in for spicy chicken-curry pies, egg-and-Spam brioche rolls, 120-gram New York-style cookies, and the signature kuih (small, glutinous desserts flavoured with mung-bean paste, coconut and more – they’re common in Southeast Asia).

Honourable mentions
In a sign of the times, two excellent Melbourne operators made the shift towards takeaway-only this year. Carlton North’s Turkish corner cafe Babajan ditched dine-in for good, with owner Kirsty Chiaplias declaring, “We’ll never have an à la carte menu again”. And the beloved Mile End Bagels expanded to a second, hole-in-the-wall shop on a Brunswick backstreet.

This article first appeared on Broadsheet on December 7, 2020. Menu items may have changed since publication.