In the late 1950s, my great-uncle Alex took a woman named Roslyn on a date to Pellegrini’s, a cafe that had opened a few years earlier on Bourke Street in Melbourne. It was touting the latest thing: real Italian coffee made by real Italians. Leo and Vildo Pellegrini had arrived in Australia after the war to find what was, in their eyes, a coffee desert. They imported one of the country’s first true espresso machines, a Gaggia—and the city never looked back.
In fact, Melbourne had been obsessed with coffee since the 1880s, when the temperance movement led to the construction of “coffee palaces”—essentially residential hotels that served no alcohol. Some, like the 370-room Federal Coffee Palace, were so fabulous they became tourist attractions. The temperance drive didn’t work so well, but the caffeine fixation stuck.
On a sunny spring morning in the CBD, or Central Business District, I met Martina Jennings from the tour company This Is Melbourne, who designed for me 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, sadly, in the 1970s. This bijou corner space, which opened in 2011 in a former lawyer’s chambers, was cool but unintimidating: there were framed newspapers along one wall and delicious-looking pastries on the walnut counter, and the servers wore beautiful leather butcher’s aprons.
From Left: Ben Clement/Patricia Coffee Brewers; Armelle Habib/Market Lane Coffee
The team at Patricia 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—“you can’t hide anything with filter,” he said—made with beans from a small farm in Ecuador. My elegant cream-colored cup, which had an unusually short handle, was made by Sydney-based ceramist Malcolm Greenwood. Persuading him to supply Patricia’s wasn’t easy. According to Heath, “He has to stop surfing long enough to make them!” Next came the best iced coffee I’ve ever tried. It resembled a light, caffeinated Guinness and was served cocktail-style, with a giant ice cube.
Jennings and I also visited the Collins Street branch of Market Lane Coffee. In this airy space on the ground floor of a restored Victorian town house, 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—no simple matter on this side of the globe. Beans from Colombia take four to six weeks to arrive by sea; eight from Rwanda, by a combination of land and sea. Today Market Lane has 10 Melbourne shops, plus a roastery. Studd has remained focused: the shops don’t serve food or tea. “I want customers to connect the farm to the name,” she said firmly. “If they come in asking for coffee from La Piña, my work is done.”
Seven Seeds
It was just three minutes’ walk to Warkop, a slender cafe founded in 2021 by Barry Susanto and Erwin Chandra, two Indonesians who met 15 years ago, when both had just arrived in Australia. The name is short for Warung Kopi, which means “coffee stall” in Indonesian, and Susanto and Chandra are aiming to re-create the laid-back feel of the roadside stands of their homeland. “People can come in wearing their pajamas if they like,” Susanto told me.
There is, however, one big difference. The warungs serve instant coffee, but the partners knew that would never work in Melbourne, so they invested 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. “Melbourne already had a tradition of demanding good coffee,” he told me, “but there wasn’t a lot of information on provenance back then.” At St. Ali and, later, Brother Baba Budan (both still beloved), he started roasting his own beans; soon, he said, “everyone was roasting for themselves.”
His current company, Seven Seeds, includes a roastery and four cafes. We met at one of them, Traveller, a tiny spot in one of Melbourne’s “laneways,” or narrow pedestrian alleys, around the corner from Parliament House. With only eight seats, it made the others I had visited look like palaces. Dundon co-owns a coffee farm in Honduras. He is still doing his best to serve great coffee, although not at what he sees as the crazy prices that some Melbourne cafes now charge. He is preoccupied with squaring the circle: purveying great, affordable coffee that doesn’t stiff the producer.
My 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.
A version of this story first appeared in the August 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Rise and Grind.”
