It’s a Saturday morning in mid-2010s Melbourne and brunch is on the agenda. Whether you go to Top Paddock for ricotta hotcakes, Auction Rooms for banana-walnut bread with espresso butter or Proud Mary for potato hash with bagna cauda, one thing is certain: there’ll be a wait – and probably a long one.

As an idea, brunch has been around since at least 1895. Writing for Hunter’s Weekly that year, Englishman Guy Beringer encouraged rising late after a night out for a “cheerful, sociable, and inciting” meal involving a cheeky beer or whisky. Travelling movie stars and the grand old hotels they stayed at popularised the practice in 1930s America, subbing bubbly cocktails like Mimosas and Bellinis in place of Beringer’s preferred bevs. Post-war, the US public eagerly followed their lead, with growing indifference to the Sunday morning ritual of church providing an opening for a lazy Sunday brunch instead.

Brunch didn’t truly catch on in Australia until the early ’90s, with the advent of lo-fi cafes in Fitzroy, Darlinghurst (where Bill Granger opened the first Bills) and other bohemian enclaves. It took trained chefs leaving restaurants, intensifying gentrification and the rise of specialty roasters like Seven Seeds and Wide Open Road for coffee shops to become polished destinations worth driving and queuing for. Suddenly, here was a way to eat near-restaurant-quality food – for quite a bit less money.

The watershed year was undoubtedly 2010, when Instagram launched and imbued a new ethos in diners: the camera eats first. As VSCO-filtered flat lays flooded our feeds, cafes with natural light, photogenic fit-outs and maximalist plating rose to the top of the pile. By 2015, this game of unnatural selection led to many of Melbourne’s cafes beginning to look the same. In 2018, we wondered if they were plain out of ideas.

“Ten to 15 years ago, there was a pretty defined formula for what a successful Melbourne cafe looked like – minimalist fit-outs, reclaimed timber, white walls and menus that leant heavily on smashed avocado, hotcakes and eggs every way,” says Nathan Toleman, who co-founded Top Paddock, Higher Ground and Kettle Black (all since sold). “That model worked because it met a particular moment in time when brunch was becoming a cultural institution.”

That word – institution – implies a sense of solidity or permanence. But in 2025, brunch’s popularity feels less certain. Many cafes remain busy, and some still have weekend queues for tables. But the feverish excitement of the previous era, where the wait could be an hour and Mondays were for sharing which hot new cafe you’d visited over the weekend? It’s gone.

Raymond Tan, who owns Raya and Dua, says brunch is “no longer a thing” when his friends visit Melbourne. They’d rather go to delis, bakeries or markets. He thinks the pandemic trained us to favour convenient grab-and-go options – an idea borne out by the recent explosion of sandwich shops, cinnamon scrolls, specialty matcha drinks and Asian Australian bakeries like Tan’s, which now attract the same kinds of lines sit-down brunch spots used to.

These goods are not inexpensive, but they’re usually more affordable than eggs Benedict or chilli scramble, the things we once prized as cheaper alternatives to restaurant food. “The perception [of customers] is, like, ‘It’s breakfast, it’s lunch and it shouldn’t be as expensive as dinner’,” Tan says. Nowadays Melburnians seem more interested in seeking out “ little treats ”, a mentality that re-emerges whenever times get tough economically.

Of course, social media remains as important as ever, whether talking about these little treats or a full-service brunch. But the impact of the Instagrammable 2010s-style outing has faded. The “ messy chic ” aesthetic replaced the over-curated one long ago, as users started posting casually rather than planning out their grids. Nonchalant photo dumps came in.

In short: a shot of a beautiful, carefully fussed-over plate just doesn’t cut it anymore. “People want to see the process and the story [behind the dish],” Tan says. But he also notes a move to more stripped-back dishes. “Brunches have switched to simpler things. Less scrambled and poached eggs, and more boiled eggs.”

Carlton North’s Florian is the undisputed poster child for this new (but old) era of simplicity. Co-owner Dom Gattermayr says when she and co-founder Rose Richards opened the cafe in 2021, they wanted to “provide an alternative” to the already-crowded brunch dining scene. The cafe has separate breakfast and lunch menus, and simply plated Euro-style dishes like cured fish plates and tartines topped with seasonal produce. Notably, it still has queues, much to the frustration of neighbours.

Tan, who grew up in Malaysia and has lived in Australia for 20 years, thinks people of different diasporas are also going back to the flavours of their childhood, which is diversifying daytime offerings in a way that benefits of all of us. This, more than anything, may be what’s keeping sit-down brunches kicking in the little-treat era.

Japanese breakfasts are everywhere. Mexican breakfast is a finally a thing, along with Filipino at Halaya and French Lebanese at Salam.

Sapol Deoisares, who runs Roslyn Thai in West Melbourne with his wife Busarin “Rin” Rojkaranwong, has seen a dramatic shift in what Melburnians want from brunch. Seven years ago, he says, the city was all about big and elaborate dishes. It was a “big question mark” to serve Thai-style pork ball congee. Now, alongside baguettes with fillings like chicken satay and scrambled eggs, the congee is a bestseller – queue or no queue.

Newcomers Beautiful Jim Key and Open House swap coffees for cocktails and vinos when they switch from breakfast to lunch menus at noon. The new Lumen People location in Fitzroy will put its wine bar front and centre.

“A lot of the wine bars now that have opened have become all-day eateries, where you can go in and have a simpler, more refined breakfast offering, and then be able to have a glass of wine and then dine into the night,” says Toleman. He calls these venues, “the new version of a modern cafe.”

Gattermayr agrees. She’s seeing more venues blurring the line between cafe and bistro, with higher-calibre offerings. Many of these all-day spots serve lunch, dinner and sometimes breakfast in one continuous flow. In 2023, Florian followed suit: every Friday, the sun-soaked cafe turns into a relaxed diner with a rotating menu and roaming sommeliers. It’s a time for the kitchen to expend its creative energy, whether by exploring a different cuisine each week, reworking family recipes or collaborating with guest chefs.

Florian’s most popular dish is Eggs Florian (a riff on eggs Florentine) – something that wouldn’t look out of place on a 2010s brunch menu, but presented differently now. It’s more pared-back, more thoughtful, and more in line with the slower, story-driven dining culture Melbourne has shifted towards.

The golden age of brunch may be behind us, but its DNA runs through the city’s new wave of cafes, bakeries and wine bars.