Why Northcote, and how the mornings run

We took over the shop on Kettleford Street in 2017. It had been a milk bar, then a phone repair place, then empty for most of a winter, and the first thing we did was pull down the false ceiling and find the original brick behind it. Maeve had been making coffee in the city for nine years by then and was tired of pouring two hundred takeaways a morning for people she would never see twice. Northcote looked like the opposite of that: a suburb where the same faces come past the same window at roughly the same time every morning.

The idea was small and we have not really changed it. Open before the first train rush. Grind for every shot instead of filling a hopper and hoping. Cook breakfast on a real pan. Know people's orders without making a performance of it.

A lot of that is just being open early. We are in the building by half past five, and the first coffee usually goes out about twenty to seven, before we open, to whoever is standing at the door looking like they have been awake for eleven minutes. We know that walk. We have all done that walk.

Theo came in as kitchen lead after seven years in a Fitzroy bistro and rebuilt the menu around what a small kitchen can cook properly at volume: eggs, mushrooms, avocado on good sourdough, and one big plate for people who skipped dinner. Ines starts at four to laminate, so by seven the whole room smells like butter, which is not a marketing decision, it is just what happens. Jules runs the floor and the catering book, which began when an office two doors down asked whether we could send breakfast up for eleven people, and now goes out to Thornbury, Fairfield and Clifton Hill most weeks.

We are not a roastery and we do not pretend to be. The house blend is roasted for us in small batches in Melbourne's north, to a recipe we tasted through for four months before we put it on the machine. We buy one single origin as a filter, change it when the season changes, and tell you what it is if you ask.

Nine years in, the part we are proudest of is not the coffee. It is that about a hundred and eighty people can walk in here and never have to say what they want. That is most of the business. Some mornings start badly. We would like yours to finish better than it started.