Coracle

Japanese$$

This venue is one of Good Food’s 100 Essential Melbourne Cafes and Bakeries of 2026.

Coracle is perhaps best defined as a fine-dining cafe. There’s coffee and tea, eggs and toast, soup and sandwiches, but everything is rendered with deep thought, pristine ingredients and exquisite care. Just ask the toast: cloud-fluffy Japanese milk bread grilled over binchotan charcoal.

Owners Duong “Jane” Nu Duc Tam and her partner, Wong “Benny” Tat Ying are from Vietnam and Hong Kong respectively, and they’ve embraced a passion for Japanese culture and cuisine. Those three cultures are all represented on the menu, but the bedrock dish is the Japanese breakfast set, a tray of small dishes that includes fish, rice, soup, something fried, something grilled, a little sashimi and pickles.

The Viet coffee is its own feat of creativity: a blend of condensed, evaporated and coconut milks, steamed together with filter coffee. Breakfast really can be the most important meal of the day; Coracle reminds us to slow down and enjoy it.

Must order: The Japanese breakfast set. It’s a premium product and is $55 to account for that.

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Last visited: June 2026