NORTHSIDE Espresso + Kitchen

Order the Brunswick Classic and a flat white at Northside Espresso + Kitchen and the cafe's whole premise lands in one go: Melbourne brekkie, third-wave coffee, plated with intent rather than abundance. Jess Huddle and Cade Pentland-Boyce opened the cafe in February 2017 after a stretch in Melbourne, restored the former Turk's building on Princess Street into a working brunch storefront, and earned a 2017 Heritage Week Award for the revival. The kitchen runs on made-to-order seasonal brunch, baked goods, fresh sandwiches, cocktails, and third-wave coffee, locally sourced where possible. Eight years in, the equation hasn't moved.

The brekkie anchors carry most of the morning. Avo Smash arrives with feta, mint, lemon, Thai chili, and a slab of grilled sourdough. Tim's Benny is the cafe's richer eggs benedict — the order for a diner who wants the morning to feel like a meal. The Brunswick Classic stays in regular rotation as the Melbourne-coded brekkie plate, while the vine ripened tomato benedict and the smoked coho salmon plate widen the table for diners who want eggs without the standard supporting cast. A roast chicken sandwich and a pork belly sandwich open up the order for the lunch-leaning end of the morning. The bake case keeps pace: tiramisu milk bread, bruleed banana cruffin, and a Melbourne Mont Blanc all sit alongside the daily plates, and they move quickly enough that the case at noon rarely resembles the case at nine.

The drinks program is part of the visit rather than an afterthought. Flat whites leave the espresso machine with the same attention as the plates leaving the pass; the strawberry iced matcha has its own following; mimosas come with citrus squeezed that morning; the espresso martini reads as a small dare in a cafe that closes by mid-afternoon. The order math leans toward the cup: a tiramisu milk bread with a flat white, a cruffin with a strawberry iced matcha, a benny with whatever is pulled at the moment. Third-wave coffee is not a marketing line here — it is the reason a flat white shows up at plenty of tables next to the benny rather than a side of bacon.

Jess Huddle and Cade Pentland-Boyce returned from Melbourne in the mid-twenty-tens with the intention of running a cafe that worked the Australian way — the breakfast plate as a finished thing, the coffee handled with care, the service unforced. According to local reporting from the time of the opening, the couple took on the former Turk's building on Princess Street and restored it themselves, a renovation that put the cafe on the city's heritage map before it was on the brunch map. The 2025 move further down Princess Street into the former Frameworks space kept Northside in the same downtown corridor it has worked from the start — a new build-out, with the daily service unchanged.

The dining room is mid-century modern and laid back, the menu refreshes around the seasons, and the doors open at eight and close by three on weekdays, four on weekends — walk-in only, every day of the week. No reservations means Northside is a default for groups of friends meeting for breakfast, regulars cycling through during the morning rush, and travellers who hear about the matcha or the cruffin and want to see if the talk holds up. Princess Street picks up traffic from the lake and the university campus; this end of it keeps a cafe that orders Melbourne for breakfast and means it. The work that goes into a flat white at Northside is the same work that goes into a benny, and the diner picks up both halves of that at the door.