How brunch has gone from eggs on toast to gourmet feast

AUSTRALIAN chefs are taking our classic breakfasts — avo on toast, fritters and flat whites — to some of the most popular foodie cities around the world.

TASTE- the Kettle Black

IT HAS long been said that for optimal good health you should eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper.

But no other country in the world wakes up and eats nearly as well as Australia. Danish superstar chef René Redzepi, no less, raved about Australia’s unique cafe scene while here for his Copenhagen restaurant Noma’s Sydney pop-up, Noma Australia, earlier this year.

Even small coffee shops serve up far from ordinary breakfast fare all day, from avocado on artisanal sourdough and hotcakes to chia puddings, house-made granola, quinoa bowls and green smoothies.

We’re helping the rest of the world start their day with a smile too. The hallmarks of Australian cafes — great coffee (often made by Aussie baristas), communal tables, bare-bulb lights, luxuriously relaxed fit-outs and friendly service — have become as recognisable as the markers of a New York deli, English pub or French bistro.

Noma’s head chef Rene Redzepi in the kitchen at his pop up restaurant Noma in Barangaroo, Sydney.

In New York, Australian-owned breakfast spots include Sweatshop, Five Leaves, Two Hands, Little Collins, Ruby’s, Milk Bar, Bluebird Coffee Shop, Flinders Lane, Brunswick and

Bluestone Lane. In LA offerings include Paramount Coffee Project, which serves a Vegemite and butterscotch milkshake, and the tiny yet popular Coffee+Food. Melbourne coffee brand St Ali is also planning to open three stores in LA within the next 18 months.

London’s Antipodean cafe scene includes Bills, Workshop Coffee Co., Lantana Cafe, Kaffeine and Flat White. Paris has Tuck Shop, Coutume (French/Australian co-ownership) and Holybelly (owned by a French couple who were inspired by Melbourne’s cafe scene when they lived there).

And Berlin has the Melbourne Canteen.

The modern Aussie breakfast was arguably born in 1993, when a young self-taught cook named Bill Granger opened a small eponymously named cafe in Darlinghurst serving plump corn fritters and ricotta hotcakes with honeycomb butter.

Since then, London-based Granger has rolled out his cafes in locations worldwide from Japan to Hawaii and Seoul to London.

Bill Granger’s famous sweet corn fritters.

Granger believes Australian breakfasts still lead the world. “It has a lot to do with our early-morning lifestyle and climate,” he says. “(And) we have an exciting combination of wellness, design, underpinned by a highly sophisticated food scene.”

The queen of Australian food publishing, Donna Hay, agrees. “Other countries are very much following our lead,” she says.

“LA and New York do have a great brunch culture, too, but I think you can’t beat the freshness of the produce you get in Australia and the creativity of our dishes.”

Hay says frittata and Bircher muesli were big breakfast news when she launched her first cookbook in 1997. “And I recall fruit compote on everything.” But now she says almost anything goes before noon. Case in point: the summer issue of Hay’s Fresh+Light magazine featured breakfast popsicles made from yoghurt, fruit and granola, while the autumn issue puts a savoury spin on waffles.

Hay is also planning more breakfast salads. “I love those bowls of quinoa and shredded kale, packed with nuts, seeds and topped with a poached or fried egg or a little smoked fish — delicious.”

In other words, food that’s good enough to eat all day and night.

A classic breakfast at Bills.

It just keeps on getting better, too, thanks to a new generation of Australian chefs with fine-dining backgrounds who are revolutionising pre-midday menus with artfully arranged plates and curated ingredients previously reserved for after dark.

Once, serious chefs would not be seen dead in the kitchen before noon. Nor would you see edible flowers, micro herbs or house-cured anything while the sun was out. But breakfast is now the time for adventurous chefs to rise and shine.

Cooking up magic mornings in Melbourne are ex-Vue du Monde’s Simon Ward at Hammer & Tong 412; Ben Farrant (ex-Gills Diner) and Alric Hansen (ex-the Crimean) at Small Victories; Matt Wilkinson (ex-Circa) at Pope Joan; and Jesse Mctavish (ex-Top Paddock) at the Kettle Black.

In Sydney, there’s ex-Tetsuya’s chefs Mark LaBrooy and Darren Robertson behind Three Blue Ducks (also in Byron Bay); Christopher Thé (ex-Claudes and Quay) at Black Star Pastry;

and Brent Savage, serving brunch on weekends at Yellow — go for the toasted licorice bread with house-cured butter.

Mctavish says chefs doing daytime hours are creating a new genre of dining by offering fine food in a casual environment for less than $30 a plate. “It’s far more approachable for a broader audience,” he says.

Kettle Black’s coconut yoghurt with fruit, seeds and nuts.

At the Kettle Black, the chilli scrambled eggs come with cured Flinders Island wallaby, feta and seasonal leaves; the house-made coconut yoghurt is topped with a sprinkling of gluten-free grains, seeds, nuts, citrus powder, dried strawberries and petals.

“I wanted everyone to be exposed to great ingredients. (That means) fresh truffles, jamon, curing our own fish for breakfast, direct supply with farms, cooking sous-vide, a Pacojet for breakfast service and the ‘f’ word: foraging,” Mctavish says. “I’d pick seaweed and keep in it my boardshorts while I surfed then use it on lunch service that day.”

LaBrooy and Robertson take a similarly balanced approach to serious food and serious fun while serving breakfast, lunch and dinner at their Three Blue Ducks cafes in Sydney’s beachside Bronte and Byron Bay in northern New South Wales.

“We power the music and do things our way,” LaBrooy says. “(But) we look at the cafe through the eyes of a restaurant and see if we can raise the bar,” he says. “The strong sense of community is another element we love. Plus, we thought if we are paying rent it makes sense to have the space working for us three times a day. It’s a much bigger picture than just bacon and eggs.”

The raw breakfast plate, maple toasted muesli and farm green with an egg at the Three Blue Ducks in Ewingsdale, Byron Bay. Picture: Dylan Robinson

That translates to a farm-to-table approach supporting local growers, a heavy emphasis on fresh produce and sophisticated flavours such as cauliflower and broccoli rice with miso-eggplant, kale, sauerkraut, seaweed, pickled ginger, charred shallots, toasted sesame and poached egg.

“We use the same chefs to do breakfast that we use at night because we decided to embark on a pathway that is a little more technical where everything is perfectly cooked,” he says.

On an average morning, the Three Blue Ducks team will serve almost 300 breakfasts in Bronte and even more in Byron, proving going out for breakfast is definitely “a thing”.

“Even if you order lots of sides and go a little crazy on drinks, it’s impossible to spend an unbelievable amount at breakfast,” says food blogger Lee Tran Lam of The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry. “You could spend hundreds of dollars on dinner but you never need to spend a lot to have a memorable breakfast.”

In fact, breakfast food is becoming so memorable it is migrating beyond its traditional timeslot.

Michelin-starred British chef Jason Atherton’s first Sydney restaurant, Kensington Street Social, serves a starter on its dinner menu called the English breakfast tea and toast: pieces of toast topped with dollops of bone marrow served with tiny cups of aerated Parmesan and mushroom broth poured from a teapot.

Meanwhile, the cocktail list includes a Vegemite-infused dirty gin martini and the Hipster Breakfast: banana-bread infused rum, salted buttermilk syrup, cold-drip coffee and Fernet-Branca served in a ceramic mug. But don’t order too many — you probably made plans for breakfast the next morning.

This article originally appeared in the May issue of Vogue Australia, which is out now.

The May issue of Vogue Australia, with Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke on the cover.