Rise and Grind

A new generation of roasters has given Melbourne's coffee culture a shot of energy.

- Nina Caplan

ABOVE, FROM LEFT The morning rush at Patricia Coffee Brewers, in Melbourne; Market Lane Coffee's Collins Street outpost, set in an 1872 town house.

IN THE LATE 1950S, my great-uncle Alex took a woman named Roslyn on a date to Pellegrini’s, a café 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 cafés. 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.