Dress up your avocadoes on toast, or you’ll get smashed

It started, innocently enough, as ‘smashed avocado on toast’.

It started, innocently enough, as “smashed avocado on toast”.

Sure, we probably pinched the “smashed” concept from Jamie Oliver, who loves smashing edible things in the kitchen, but everything else about this no-brainer breakfast/snack/supper dish is, apparently, all our own work; as dinky-di as the lamington and the flat white.

Avo on toast, or its most common variation, avo with feta on toast, made sense to cafe owners everywhere. Avocadoes were cheap (at least until now), easier and quicker to prepare than eggs and seen as healthy and delicious by their customers. A little luxury, a fair whack of profit. Win-win.

Now? Plain, old smashed avocado on toast just doesn’t cut it any more, not now it’s on breakfast menus from the city to the bush. You want your customers to take you seriously? You need next-level.

At smash-hit Sydney cafe Grounds of Alexandria, the “signature avocado” leads the breakfast menu: it comes with heirloom tomato, feta, pomegranate, za’atar, garden mint and micro-herbs and is served with The Grounds signature bread.

At The Plant Gallery, a new raw-food, vegan, gluten-free and refined sugar-free restaurant in Bondi, your “avocado on toast” is supported by paprika bread, sumac, chilli oil and coriander (and costs $15). Or you might prefer “smashed avocado with tomato, breakfast radish and chives on soy and linseed toast” at the Two Birds One Stone cafe in Melbourne’s South Yarra.

But why stop at toast? The neo-health movement has appropriated avocado for its green smoothies, too. At Laneway Greens, a juice and “handcrafted salads” bar in Melbourne’s Flinders Lane, avocado pops up in two smoothies — kale and kiwi (along with coconut water and baby spinach), and peanut butter and cacao (with banana and dates … hmmm). They are $10 a pop.

If you need any more convincing of avocado’s ubiquity, here it is: the backlash has officially begun.

Talking about his soon-to-open Chinese breakfast and lunch venue Lawyers, Guns and Money, Melbourne chef Victor Liong was quoted this week as saying he’s tired of the sameness.

In Windsor, Melbourne, the excellent new Italian restaurant Abbondante is soon to open for lunch Fridays to Sundays, citing dismay at the locals’ tendency to eat the same few things at lunchtime over and over again. “We just need to convince people they won’t be arrested for not smashing their avocados,” Abbondante said in a statement.