Mexican Breakfast Is Finally a Thing in Melbourne – for Real This Time

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Two weeks ago, Ricardo Garcia Flores started advertising El Columpio’s new, earlier, opening hours. Since opening just over a year ago, the Hot-Listed Mexican restaurant’s faithful renditions of tacos, tamales and its signature soup, pozole, have won it a feverish fandom. Now, Garcia Flores think it’s the right time to push further into breakfast, with a morning menu of chilaquiles, churros with drinking chocolate, and coffee.

“And people have just been coming and coming,” Garcia Flores says. “And early.”

Chilaquiles have long been on the El Columpio menu, but this is the first time it’s offered Mexico’s most ubiquitous breakfast – a variable dish that always involves fried leftover tortilla pieces, typically in collaboration with salsa, eggs and cheese – for breakfast.

“People associated Mexican food more with lunch and dinner, not breakfast,” Garcia Flores says. “This concept is new.”

Which isn’t exactly right. Since around the time Mamasita opened in 2010, thanks to a confluence of factors like the doubling of Australia’s modest Mexican population and a marked increase in Australian tourism to Mexico, Mexican restaurants have proliferated throughout Melbourne.

Over the years, spots with pan-Mexican menus and Day of the Dead-coded decor have been steadily replaced by more tightly focused, regionally specific venues. As diners, we got better at telling our Mexico Cities from our Oaxacas and Baja Californias. Nixtamalising has been normalising. But for all this maturation on the lunch and dinner side, Mexican breakfast just never blew up. Not for want of trying.

Ten years ago, chilaquiles were a mainstay on the menu at Auction Rooms, in North Melbourne. Not anymore. In 2013, El Chino opened in Fitzroy North, a cafe featuring cochinita pibil tacos and chilaquiles rojos, but it closed a few years later. It’s not uncommon to see Mexican-inspired dishes or truly Mexican breakfasts make appearances on brunch menus, but they’re often consigned to the specials menu. And cafes that do successfully trade on a Mexican premise, such as Thornbury’s Little Tienda, lean towards fusing Mexican ideas with Australian brekkie staples or borrow more from the breakfast tacos and burritos of Tex-Mex and Cali-Mex than Mexico itself.

According to La Tortilleria’s founder Gerardo Lopez, Melbourne breakfast failed to launch back then for one simple reason: Australian brunch.

“With the Mexican wave 12 or so years ago, breakfast is one of those things that you would expect to happen, but it was hard to do and find,” Lopez says. “To be honest, when I go overseas, the thing I miss most about Melbourne is its breakfast – and I say that because that quality makes it very hard to compete.

“So for Mexican breakfast to work here it has to be traditional – you have to sell it as an alternative to Australian breakfast, not a competitor, for people looking for something different for breakfast.”

That’s what Lopez did two years ago, when he introduced breakfast to the offering at La Tortilleria Kensington. It’s a morning menu that involves classics such as huevos rancheros and chilaquiles, alongside a selection of the taqueria’s more breakfast-friendly tacos.

“We were trying to do the full Mexican breakfast experience, not just one or two dishes, and that’s what it’s been about,” Lopez says.

Initially, breakfast exclusively drew members of the local Mexican community, looking for a taste of home. But recently, the breakfast menu’s appeal has broadened beyond that.

“Mexicans were the first people to come and get the word out and vouch for us,” Lopez says. “Now there’s a very good base of people here from the US and Latin America who have experienced Mexican breakfast – as well as more Australians coming here before or after a trip to Mexico.”

But Lopez isn’t just noticing an uptick in morning trade within his own walls. The wholesale side of the business has also seen a robust increase in cafes as clients, so maybe Mexican meals are coming off cafes’ specials lists and joining their menus on a full-time basis.

Even Guzman y Gomez, which is hardly authentic, has had a brekkie boost lately. In its most recent half-year results announcement, the chain reported 19 per cent year-on-year comp sales growth for breakfast.

“Not that I think it’s Mexican food, but with more and more people having breakfast burritos, that association is going to help,” says Lopez. “It’s changing palates in a way that will provide more opportunities for Mexican breakfast.

“And I’m seeing it – more and more Mexican restaurants are expanding into breakfast.”

For Frankie’s Tortas and Tacos in Fitzroy, a move into breakfast was a no-brainer. The restaurant’s Mexico City-style torta sandwiches are beloved, so introducing a breakfast sandwich tailored for the quiet time before lunch just made sense. It’s loaded with chorizo and egg, and hash browns are on offer on the side.

“We used to do it back when we were in the food truck on Smith Street, and then we brought it back here late last year, to trial it on the specials menu,” says Frankie’s co-owner Stuart Morton.

It passed probation, and now it’s back on the menu.

“A lot of people had always asked for it to come back,” Morton says. “The take-up’s been good so far.”

It’s the same story at El Columpio, 50 metres further up Johnston Street.

“When we opened, our chilaquiles with chicken and chorizo didn’t get a lot of interest from people, but now they’re really popular – almost the favourite,” Garcia Flores says.

“Then I had repeat customers who went to Mexico asking me all the time why I didn’t have chilaquiles with eggs or with rib-eye. That’s why we decided to do breakfast.

“It feels like the perfect time to put it on the menu.”

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