Red Door Corner Store

If you walk a song’s length down Mitchell Street from High Street in Northcote, you’ll stumble upon the neighbourhood corner store and cafe, Red Door. Low-key and with a pretty rear garden where you can sip fresh juice from recycled glass jars in the sun, Red Door brings back the neighbourly to neighbourhood cafes.

Red Door’s daily offerings – such as Melbourne-based Mailing Room coffee or the popular breakfast roll (free-range fried egg, tomato kasundi, double smoked free-range bacon, avocado, rocket and aioli) – have been bringing locals in since it opened.

Shannon, one of the cafe’s owners and a chef by trade, explains that their focus has been on serving great coffee and excellent food with exceptional service and on evolving while remaining genuinely community based.

Baking apparatus is tacked onto the walls and hung from the ceiling as an homage to Shannon’s love of pastry and baked goods. Customers are drawn in by gingerbread people, passionfruit cupcakes, honey joys and chocolate crackles. “I make them for children, [but] it’s the adults that tend to eat them,” Shannon notes.