Using the Zomato (formerly Urbanspoon) website, I have reviewed the customer rating of cafes in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Cafes with a rating of at least four out of five were considered likely to contribute to a cafe lifestyle if they amassed more than 500 votes. When I last did this exercise in October 2015 most highly rated cafes in Melbourne centred on Fitzroy and Collingwood while for Sydney the hotspot was Surry Hills and Paddington. Brisbane’s highest rated cafes at this time were clustered in the New Farm peninsula.
Last year I made the point that the hippest cafes in our biggest cities clustered close to the CBD and well within what I called the goat’s cheese curtain. A year later and the nation’s highest rated cafes have moved, signalling a tectonic shift in modern urban culture. And with implications for property values.
I have repeated the methodology to identify the hippest (or the most highly rated) cafes but have added a twist. By multiplying the star rating (eg 4.4) by the critical mass of votes (eg 6000) it is possible to develop a Cool Cafe Index (CCI) as a function of both rating and votes. The top 10 coolest cafes in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane as measured by the CCI are spilling from traditional hipster suburbs (like Fitzroy and Surry Hills) to a wider array of localities within the inner suburbs (eg Abbotsford and Newtown) but also to suburban places like Bentleigh East, Parramatta and Hendra.
Hipsters are on the move; they are being spun off as if by some centrifugal force beyond the inner suburbs and into the Hills Hoist heartland. Melbourne’s Merchants Guild in Bentleigh East signals the gentrification of a suburb that might have been previously considered somewhat suburban. Not any more. Bentleigh East is located 15 km from the Melbourne CBD, is well served by rail and other infrastructure and offers adjacency to prestigious Brighton. It’s as if the next generation is re-evaluating the qualities of parts of traditional suburbia.
The same logic applies to Parramatta, home to Circa Espresso, which makes the Sydney top 10 by the CCI measure. Parramatta is located 20km west of Surry Hills and yet it has now snared one of Sydney’s coolest cafes. Again it’s as if the next generation is determined to take the civilising influences of their culture beyond the inner city so as to recreate parts of suburbia in their own image.
Arguably, Brisbane isn’t as progressed on the suburbanisation of the hipster movement as are the bigger and more expensive cities of Sydney and Melbourne. But it’s getting there. Brisbane offers Dandelion & Driftwood in Hendra, 7km north east of the CBD but critically located adjacent to prestigious Clayfield.
This is a common theme in the Hills Hoist hipster cafe movement: look for undervalued suburban places positioned near prestige suburbs, eg Brighton/Bentleigh and Clayfield/Hendra.
But there is another aspect to the Cool Cafe Index that is more powerful than tracking cafe movement and that is its ability to rank cafes between cities. What is and where is the centre of gravity, the ground zero, of the hipster cafe movement across the Australian continent?
Well, now with the CCI rating system it’s possible to show which cafe gets the best rating from the most number of voters. Brisbane’s Chouquette Patisserie & Cafe in New Farm scores the highest rating with 4.7 out of five but this is from just 848 votes. There is one standout cafe and there is a standout city on this measure. Melbourne is home to Australia’s hipster nation, with seven of the 10 highest rated cafes by the CCI measure. Sydney has three: Bourke Street Bakery (CCI value 12,153), The Grounds of Alexandria (CCI value 11,524) and Black Star Pastry (CCI value 8883). Brisbane’s best by this measure, Au Cirque, has a CCI value of 6790 and ranks 12th across the three cities.
The standout cafe by this measure is the French-inspired Hardware Societe in Hardware Lane in the Melbourne CBD, with a CCI value of 41,252, almost double the second ranking cafe in Melbourne CBD’s Cumulus with a CCI value of 24,976. The balance of Melbourne’s leading cafes are scattered throughout the CBD and inner suburbs. The Sydney CBD is not a favoured location for highly rated hipster cafes and generally neither is the Brisbane CBD.
The suburban movement by some highly rated cafes suggest that Australia’s cafe society lifestyle is moving mainstream and especially into underappreciated suburbs with a prestige adjacency. But this analysis also shows that Melbourne’s cafe lifestyle is nationally unique. And especially within the CBD. The lanes, the alleys, the little streets have all coalesced to breed an urban culture that is nationally significant, and that is now determined to colonise territories in far off and exotic lands like Bentleigh East.
Australia’s social demography is on the move and nowhere is this better evidenced than through the shifts and shuffles of our prized cafe culture.
Bernard Salt is a KPMG partner and an adjunct professor at Curtin Business School. Research and mapping by Cody Phelan.
bsalt@kpmg.com.au
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There is a theory that it is culture that sets the property agenda. This theory says that the ultimate lifestyle in any city can be had from a location that triangulates access to work and to the best culture and infrastructure that a city has to offer. In a traditional sense this can mean access to a concert hall or opera house. In a modern sense this can mean access to what has become known as a cafe lifestyle. Perhaps by tracking geographic change in a city’s coolest cafes it is possible to identify where residential property values might be on the rise.