Growing up, breakfast was clearly the third meal in the Seltzer household. Most days it was cereal. Sometimes instant oatmeal. Occasionally on a weekend there was a cooked breakfast. At college there was cooked breakfast available every day, but it was college food – lots of grease and calories, rarely memorable. As often as not, I had cereal. It was only when I moved to Melbourne that I learned that breakfast could be exciting.
Melbourne is one of the world’s great food cities, full stop. One of the most iconic Melbourne eateries is Brunetti’s. So much so, that one feels Gabriel’s breakfast blog is incomplete without mentioning it. Since the mid-1980s, Brunetti’s has sat on or near Lygon Street, Carlton, which has long been the heart of Melbourne’s Italian restaurant district. (As an aside, when I first came to Melbourne, all but one restaurant on Lygon Street was Italian, but times have changed and they are now a minority). When I first came to Melbourne, Brunetti’s was in a small shopfront on the east side of Lygon. Later it moved to the old Yiddish newspaper building on Faraday Street, just off Lygon. Now it’s back on Lygon Street in a small arcade in what used to be the independent bookshop. Happily, the bookshop, “Readings” is still around, just across the street. Amazingly, there is also still a version of the Yiddish newspaper, although it is only published for special occasions. There are several other Brunetti’s locations in Melbourne, but the one in Carlton is the original and the best.
As a starting point on the food, the number one reason to go to Brunetti’s is dessert. The cakes and pastries are perhaps the best that I’ve ever had. Thus, I’ve included a couple of dessert photos to this blog, even though strictly speaking, it is meant to be about breakfast. While breakfast is not the main focus of Brunetti’s, it is nevertheless exceptionally good. The menu is the standard Australian fare, accompanied by great Australian coffee. Best of all, with the Aussie dollar below £0.50 Brunetti’s is, for now, inexpensive – with a full breakfast plus two coffees, a small pastry, and a juice costing about £23.
Now on to our experience. We had a couple hours to kill, as we arrived in Melbourne too early to check into our AirBnB. Brunetti’s has a lot of space and we sat from 9:00 to 11:30 without being questioned. As the lunch-time crowd started to arrive, we quietly made our way out. During our time there, I had the staple Australian dish of smashed avocado. It comes with poached eggs and salad on sour dough, with a homemade parmesan cracker. It’s exactly what you would expect for an Australian breakfast and very well done; the eggs are free range and the bread is homemade. My only small complaint is that I’m not a huge fan of salad with eggs. For coffee, I went with the Australian staple of the flat white. Again, very well done and much less expensive than it would be in the UK.
Onto the overall evaluation. The pastries are a clear 10/10, but this is a breakfast blog. I’m giving it a 9.5/10, losing a bit for the salad, but gaining some of it back because you can get a fabulous pastry with your coffee. (Andrew Seltzer)