If you walk a song’s length down Mitchell Street from High Street in Northcote, you’ll stumble upon the neighbourhood corner store and cafe, Red Door. Low-key and with a pretty rear garden in which to sip fresh juice from recycled glass jars in the sun, Red Door brings back the neighbourly in neighbourhood cafe.

Red Door’s daily offerings – such as Melbourne-based Mailing Room coffee or their popular breakfast roll (free-range fried egg, tomato kasundi, double smoked free-range bacon, avocado, rocket and aioli) – have been bringing locals in to share in its beginnings: a love of breakfast.

Shannon, one of the cafe’s owners and a chef by trade, explains that their focus has been on serving great coffee and excellent food with exceptional service, and on evolving while remaining genuinely community based.

Baking apparatus is tacked onto the walls and hung from the ceiling as an homage to Shannon’s love of pastry and baked goods, drawing people in for gingerbread people, passionfruit cupcakes, honey joys and chocolate crackles. “I make them for children, [but] it’s the adults that tend to eat them,” Shannon notes.

Enter through a red door for good coffee and a reprieve from busy city lives, every day of the week.