The New Wave Of Roasters Ushering In A Renaissance In Melbourne's Iconic Coffee Scene – CoffeeTalk

Melbourne has a long history of coffee culture, dating back to the late 1950s when Leo and Vildo Pellegrini imported one of the country’s first true espresso machines, a Gaggia. The city had been obsessed with coffee since the 1880s, when the temperance movement led to the construction of “coffee palaces” that served no alcohol. However, the caffeine fixation stuck.

On a sunny spring morning in the CBD, Martina Jennings from the tour company This Is Melbourne designed a bespoke walkabout of coffee shops and cafes. We started at Patricia Coffee Brewers, near the site of the Federal Coffee Palace, which was pulled down in the 1970s. Patricia Coffee Brewers works with niche importers and roasts its beans in-house. The cafe’s co-owner, Pip Heath, served me a rich and nutty filter coffee made with beans from a small farm in Ecuador. The elegant cream-colored cup, which had an unusually short handle, was made by Sydney-based ceramist Malcolm Greenwood.

Jennings and I visited the Collins Street branch of Market Lane Coffee, where co-owner Fleur Studd recalled falling for great coffee while working in London. She and her business partner Jason Scheltus opened the first Market Lane in one of the city’s many farmers’ markets in 2009 and began importing green (unroasted) coffee from Africa and South America. Studd values transparency in her supply chain, as beans from Colombia take four to six weeks to arrive by sea, and eight from Rwanda, by a combination of land and sea. Today, Market Lane has 10 Melbourne shops, plus a roastery. Studd has remained focused on the shops not serving food or tea.

Warkop, a slender cafe founded in 2021 by Barry Susanto and Erwin Chandra, is aiming to re-create the laid-back feel of the roadside stands of their homeland. They invest in a shiny La Marzocco espresso machine. In a sense, these are the modern Pellegrinis, importing a foreign cafe culture to a receptive city.

Some people attribute Melbourne’s current coffee fixation to Mark Dundon, a chilled-out guy with a shock of silver hair and a smile as bright as a freshly polished Gaggia. In the early 2000s, he opened his first cafe, St. Ali, where an interest in specialty coffee grew into an obsession with traceable, quality beans, roasted locally. His current company, Seven Seeds, includes a roastery and four cafes.

The last stop, just steps from Traveller, was where it all started. That long-ago coffee at Pellegrini’s must have been good, because Roslyn became my great-aunt; today, she is 89 and still lives in Melbourne. The high red-vinyl stools at the long bar where she sat with my great-uncle don’t work for her any longer. But we found a table outside, drank great coffee, enviously eyed our neighbors’ plates of pasta, and soaked in this lively city, still rich with the perfume of great coffees past.

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