Dosage

Avocado with poached eggs served at Dosage cafe. Photo: Wayne Taylor

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140 Burwood Highway, Burwood, 9972 9519

My score: 3.5/5

Melbourne diners, there’s a new skill you need in your repertoire. It’s injecting your breakfast with condiments from a syringe. You’ll get plenty of practice at Dosage, a hip and friendly new chemistry-themed cafe hidden in a Burwood medical centre.

Inject your smashed avo, pump extra syrup into your iced chocolate and squirt sauce into your jaffle. Perhaps you’ll feel like a doctor, a scientist, a drug addict or just a bit silly and, if you get the angle wrong, you might feel the need to hose down before moving on with your day.

The chemistry angle is also expressed in the test tube rack of spices that’s on each table, and the laboratory beakers of water, sugar and salt, ahem, or ‘sodium chloride’ as the label says. It’s all in good fun.

The small menu is divided into bagels, jaffles and the ‘smashed selection’. That’s where you’ll find the ‘fully bashed’ avocado with feta and mint on a base of beetroot hummus and topped with a poached egg. The syringe is poked into the green smash and filled with chilli oil for administering as desired. Add a spicy sprinkle of nuts and seeds, and a dusting of matcha powder and you’ve got a breakfast that suggests there are new places to take smashed avocado, that major Melbourne export to international cafe land.

My favourite use of the syringes is in the Halal Snack Pack jaffle, a special that’s so great it may meander onto the main menu. The toastie is filled with roasted potatoes and slow-braised lamb, and it’s stabbed with syringes featuring the HSP saucy trio (garlic, chilli and barbecue). Necessary? No. Gimmicky? Yes. Still cool? Absolutely!

Dosage has made much of its unpromising location in a bland building on a busy road with a cemetery and factories for near neighbours. An astro-turfed courtyard with potted greenery makes it even more of a haven. Owners Reiji Honour and Semir Elmazi have history at The Foreigner in Ivanhoe and Hyde and Seek in Ashwood, also off the beaten track and requiring special effort to seek them out.

Once you get into Dosage, though, it’s all on show. The coffee bench is open and facing the room so you can watch the barista make your drink, expertly, lovingly, carefully and, if you like, chattily. The owners see their mission as something of a coffee outreach project, bringing Collingwood-style caffeine to the burbs. They’ve got single origin, drip and filter and even nitrogen-charged coffee, brewed over 50 hours, then poured from a tap like beer, resulting in a cold coffee with a frothy head. It’s weird but I can definitely imagine this hitting the spot on a hot day. Obviously, it’s served in a beer pot.

Dosage is quirky, jaunty and optimistic. Sure, injecting your food is kind of silly but I don’t mind a bit of brunch DIY. So please, cafe doctor, up my dosage anytime.

See their website.

More Cool Cafes:

White Mojo, 182-184 Whitehorse Road, Burwood, 9817 7859.
Also part of the Burwood coffee outreach project, the second White Mojo is as pretty and presentation-focused as its city sibling on Hardware Street. Look out for Joc’s Cupcakery, stocked there on weekends.

Uncle Drew, 23 Groom Street, Clifton Hill, 9489 2077.
Drew has nice buns – breakfast buns, that is, with a fried egg, crispy bacon and greens, plus crazy shakes and seasonal pasta specials.

St Kilda Dispensary, 13 Brighton Road, St Kilda, 0402 842 407.
Also rocking the chemistry angle, and with its own array of syringe-speared pastries and muesli in beakers, the Dispensary has a village vibe that belies the main road location.

Sartoria, 115 Plenty Road, Preston, 9480 5664.
This old dress factory is dotted with vintage seamstress machinery and dishes have names like ‘The Overlocker’ (a brioche cheeseburger) and ‘The Organza’ (ricotta gnocchi), but the mood and the food are contemporary and fresh.

First published in The Age, 16th October 2016