Discovering Melbourne coffee and brunch culture and working in a café

By Amelie Duroux, University of Melbourne, Australia

One of the most exciting things about moving to Melbourne has been realising you can never get a bad coffee. Good baristas and coffee culture is so distinguished here that every cup you have is of such high quality. Part of the reason I wanted to come to Melbourne was for the brunch culture – I had worked for a couple of years in an Antipodean brunch café in London, which made me want to experience Australian coffee and brunch, and I had said this in my application for my exchange year abroad. Melbourne have claimed to have invented the flat white, which they do very well, but my new favourite staple coffee has been the Melbourne magic, a double ristretto with three-quarters full milk. Everywhere in Melbourne makes this magic coffee, something I’ll really miss when I go back to Manchester! Walking around the University of Melbourne campus, I soon noticed almost every student will be holding a cup of coffee, and this campus has coffee shops on it everywhere you turn, many more than the University of Manchester campus. I was happy to confirm that going for brunch is a huge activity here, and I have enjoyed eating a lot of avo and eggs! I enjoyed trying the iconic Mont Blanc coffee, made across the whole of Australia but invented a street away from where I live, at Good Measure. This café is on Lygon Street, famous for its Italian restaurants and cafes, where I feel right at home, being part Italian. A great area for coffee is East of Lygon Street, a suburb called Fitzroy, where there is an abundance of cafes and vintage shops, with markets every weekend.

It was nice to discover that the price of coffee is a lot cheaper in general than the UK, with the café I work at selling a regular size flat white for $5, the equivalent to about £2.50. Working as front of house staff in a typical Australian café has really allowed me to immerse myself in Aussie culture – our main customers are RMIT university students and union workers, who come in every day. This allowed me to get to know regular customers and quickly learn their names, and to make friends with my colleagues – a few Aussies and a Kiwi as well. This job provided me with a great balance between that and my university work, and since the University of Melbourne has been so flexible with allowing me to have a say as to when my seminars are, I have been able to schedule them around my shifts. I have been able to earn money to enable travelling around Australia, and loved learning that hospitality pay in Australia is so much more than the UK, with weekends often meaning double pay. I familiarised myself with iconic Aussie foods my café served, such as potato cakes, dim sims, chicken schnitzels and spanakopita. I also got used to customers saying ‘g’day mate’, ‘how’s it going?’, ‘easy as’, and them shortening everything to then add the letter ‘o’ on the end – for example binman becomes garbo, dog becomes doggo, and my colleagues even tried to shorten my name Amelie to Amo. I feel like I may have slowly but surely picked up some Aussie slang. I have loved discovering this intrinsic part of Aussie culture and am looking forward to still trying more and more cafes!