Melbourne cafe scene: cups runneth over on Hidden Secrets Tour

If you think you know Melbourne’s cafes, a tour of the city’s hole-in-the-wall coffee hotspots could prove otherwise.

Liaison Cafe, one of the stops on the Hidden Secrets Cafe Culture Tour. Picture: Matt Irwin

Like any conscientious journalist, I start out sceptical. How could any good cafes remain secret in Melbourne? And if there are any, would there be enough to comprise an afternoon cafe crawl through the CBD?

We begin a three-hour Cafe Culture Tour, with guide Fiona Sweetman, director of Hidden Secrets Tours, through central Melbourne on a Friday afternoon. Most of the city seems to have emptied on to the small streets and laneways with which the Victorian capital has become synonymous; coffee shops are comfortably filled.

As we leave Federation Square, though, and cross Flinders Street for our first stop, I have a growing suspicion I am about to be disappointed. Who doesn’t know Degraves Street, I wonder, as we head for its bluestone cobbles and its much-discussed wall-to-wall cafes?

Then we duck down into pink-tiled Campbell Arcade, a mostly preserved underground relic from the 1950s, built to stream workers into the city during the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games, and I realise that perhaps my suspicions are unfounded. This tour is not just about caffeine, although there is plenty to be supped, should you choose, starting with Campbell Arcade’s Cup of Truth, where customers drop their payment into an oversized cup and saucer, freeing the baristas to concentrate on their tasks.

This is also a tour about the culture that has formed around the city’s cafe scene, beginning with The Soup Place and its wall of pay-it-forward post-it notes; pay for someone else to have a soup, stick a note on the board, and after 3pm whoever needs sustenance can redeem it.

Over several easy hours of walking, and a quick tram ride, we peek into hole-in-the wall caffeinated hubs, admire the City Library’s Journal Cafe, which looks like it has existed for decades, not years, with its muted lighting and communal tables. We step into the standing-room-only Bar Americano in what was once a lingerie shop fronting a nondescript alley but now resembles a shabby chic snapshot from an old European city with its chequerboard floors and reclaimed “Do not Spit” tiles on the wall. Its menu may be limited but its appeal is not, and we are asked not to take photographs inside.

When it comes to Melbourne’s cafes, clearly size does not matter, a point which is obvious repeatedly as we walk along street-art decorated alleyways and past contented diners, up Bourke Street by tram and into the city’s legal enclave. Through the cavernous foyer of the National Australia Bank, where the smart Tuck Shop is a contrast to its corporate setting, we head for the back of the domed Supreme Court Building, and stop at an unspectacular corner where a crowd has gathered. They are not here to marvel at the court building’s architecture, however, but to line up for coffee at Patricia, a former lawyer’s office where, apart from a smattering of edible options, the menu’s offerings are brief: black, white or filter.

Back down the hill we approach Hardware Lane, which Fiona explains was once the city’s horse-stabling area. These days it’s the site of macaron tastings for these Cafe Culture Tours, which run on weekdays from 11am. From here it’s just a brief stroll to another stretch of cobblestones on Niagara Lane, where the Sun Moth Canteen, with its Scandinavian-styled decor and hanging plants, emerges from the streetscape as if from nowhere, as all good secrets should.

Fiona Harari was a guest of Tourism Victoria.

• www.hiddensecretstours.com

• www.visitvictoria.com