Cake lovers take note, if you want a prime position in pastry chef Matt Forbes’ dinky Cobb Lane – Yarraville’s newest and tiniest café – you may have to wait. Forbes is a legend around Melbourne town. A UK expat with a notable stint at Vue de Monde, Forbes has been supplying fancy doughnuts and other sweet nothings to illustrious cafés like Dukes, Clements Coffee Roasters (who supply Cobb’s beans) and Hammer & Tong for years, and now that he’s doing it for it for himself, mobs are flocking to the source.
The sweet smell of baking, bacon and coffee wafts throughout Cobb Lane. It’s a tight space. Flowerpots fashioned from blancmange moulds hang over a window bench for four and there are only five pale wood tables, three of which share banquette seating. It’s pretty, though. Whitewashed bricks contrast against the dark wooden floor and bulbous blue pendant lamps matched to the colour of the coffee cups swing over a glass cabinet packed with Forbes’ handiwork.
House-made Oreos are worth elbowing your way in for. The rich, chocolate-y biscuits are laced with salted caramel and held together by fluffy cream with a cardamom kick. And then there are those fat doughnuts, here stuffed with fillings like espresso custard and walnuts or raspberry and lychee jam with a light, fragrant rose custard. There’s a tower of fresh baked bread to take home too.
If you don’t have a sweet tooth, a dish of asparagus spears served with crisp, cheesy polenta and poached eggs is king of the compact brunch menu. Tangy, wafer-thin slices of apple cut the fat while walnuts add an earthy base note crunch. Meatify the whole thing with thick-cut streaky bacon from the pork enthusiasts at Pacdon Park. We’re not brave enough for the hearty British breakfast this visit, which combines your bacon with black pudding (also from Pacdon Park) with a plump Scotch egg (an egg in a crumbed pork mince jacket) and Welsh rarebit, aka toast swimming in mustardy cheese – oof.
We order an ice cream sandwich instead – a creamy strawberry disk wedged between two buttery shortbread biscuits with just a hint of anise sugar.
Queues or not, that's a proposition worth going west for.
