Australian cafes are a full-blown phenomenon in the US, celebrated by big-name publishers including the New York Times, Vogue and Eater. This success, though, is mostly limited to New York and Los Angeles. To the rest of the country – more than 300 million people all up – coffee shops are still places to line up and wait for your name to be called, with all the transactional charm of a supermarket checkout queue.

Collingwood coffee roaster and cafe Proud Mary is on a mission to change that. Six years ago, founder Nolan Hirte handed the local business (including Aunty Peg’s and Stagger Lee’s) over to his brother, and moved his family to Portland, Oregon to open a cafe. Its mix of wholesome food, specialty coffee and genuine service was an immediate success, even in a city famous (and often mocked) for its fiercely authentic, independent and artisanal spirit.

Though it’s the capital city of a state that’s gradually regressing into a Handmaid’s Tale-like theocracy, Austin, Texas has a similar attitude to Portland – which is why Hirte and wife Shari have long had their eyes on the city for US cafe number two.

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That dream was finally realised on Monday, a few years after the couple moved to Austin (with their two young kids) to make it happen.

“We kept driving by this site and saying, ‘What’s that?’” Hirte tells Broadsheet. “We were told there were heaps of other restaurants in line to take it, but the folks that own the site needed something that did coffee and breakfast, so it became game-on pretty quickly.”

The site is located in Zilker, a restaurant-heavy precinct just across the Colorado River from Austin’s CBD. There are 100 seats indoors, and more on a sunny outdoor patio. Key design elements have been carried over from Melbourne and Portland, including a wall-mounted vintage train station clock, Sansui speakers and furniture hand-built by Hirte and his dad Bob (it’s a hobby of theirs).

Sean Henley, formerly head chef at Proud Mary Collingwood, is running the kitchen and putting out dishes that’d feel elevated even in Melbourne. Take his ricotta hotcakes. They come with peaches roasted with shiso (a piquant Asian herb), whipped Basque cheesecake, tarragon-infused oil and miso and rye crumble. A vibrant Thai-style salad mixes tamarind-glazed pork belly, diced watermelon and salted cucumber with a nahm jim dressing. Then there’s the usual avo toast, Bircher, scrambled eggs and friends.

The coffee service is modelled on Aunty Peg’s, which functions more like a pub than a typical cafe. Customers take a seat at the bar, and a discreet under-bench Synesso espresso machine allows baristas to pull shots as if pouring a beer. The Proud Mary team is also using Austin to lean more heavily into its freezer program. A 2.5-metre-wide freezer – the group’s largest yet – showcases 12 coffees at a given time, including multiple options for “drip” (filter), espresso and pour-over.

This much choice and unfamiliarity would overwhelm customers anywhere in the world, but Hirte says five years in Portland helped the team develop tactics to ease people into Australian coffee culture.

“We’ve learnt how to explain ourselves better in terms of what we’re doing with coffee – starting with a simpler way to present the coffee (i.e. categories from ‘mild’ to ‘wild’ and ‘deluxe’) but also even when offering amazing geshas and the like by the cup, trying to make it easy to enjoy something very, very special.”

Proud Mary Austin
2043 South Lamar Boulevard, Austin, Texas

Hours
Daily 7am–4pm

proudmarycoffee.com
@proudmaryusa