“Coffee first, always”, it said on black and white St. Ali merch (playing cards, keyrings etc) some years ago at their South Melbourne venue. Recently, St. Ali has started selling cold brew coffee cans in bodegas and micro supermarkets like LGAs and Foodworks, with bold font on black, skinny, tall cans — a similar feeling typography and look to their “Drug Courier” coffee delivery vans. The company was one of, if not the, first Melbourne specialty coffee roasters to make their coffee beans available in supermarkets after the Covid-19 Melbourne lockdowns, filling a gaping hole in the market.

Until then, “Melbourne-style” coffee was the exclusive preserve of the “Melbourne-style” café, which was popularised in the early to mid 2000s and became internationally recognised as a specific genre of hospitality. Cafés and coffee came as a pair, born out of legacy coffee roasters and cafés, like St. Ali, Seven Seeds, Proud Mary, Market Lane, Dukes and Wide Open Road, among others.

At the same time as Melbourne-style coffee enters supermarkets, a new grammar of hospitality is emerging. Since the pandemic, with rampant inflation and a cost-of-living crisis (among other global social forces), the iconic café vernacular of the city is changing. Manicured veneers and an imported, manufactured, style of establishment: New York diners, sandwich shops charging $20 a piece, specialty donut shops, or nouveau Italian gelato are opening with greater frequency than the legacy cafés that had become an iconic fixture of the city.

Prior to supermarkets stocking St. Ali coffee beans — packaged in the colours of the Italian flag set against a superimposed cherry graphic and their characteristic black, bold, Helvetica, all caps font in repeated text, like the The Life of Pablo album cover — it was surprisingly difficult to get Melbourne-quality coffee beans outside of cafés. Woolworths and Coles mainly had a selection of Vittoria, Nespresso pods, and perhaps one or two organic or celebrity endorsed Brazil house blends. Supermarket coffee beans were basic and not indicative of the psychogeography of Melbourne and its café culture. The pandemic defamiliarised what had become second nature.

While the lockdowns have been over for some time now, the pandemic’s rhizomatic effects are still with us. As a result, the dynamic of Melbourne’s coffee scene has been affected beyond the tragic loss of hospitality jobs and venues. The inflation, cost-of-living and housing crises have been especially hard for to bare for Millennials — a generation that has had to shoulder recessions and financial and housing crises roughly every decade of their working lives. This is also the demographic most responsible for envisioning, working in, occupying, and owning the Melbourne-style café of the mid 2000s.

Millennials have of course been mocked for indulging in avocado on toast (now typically priced at over $25), paired with a single-origin Geisha Long Black at the café — an act seemingly foolish and ironic in light of the financial instability they find themselves in. Yet the pleasure of sitting in a thoughtfully curated café space with an atmosphere that actually gets them, speaks to them, to their references, sympathetic to their grim realities, their simmering depression, their loneliness, while digging into the event that is an avocado, feta, lemon, and chilli medley on home-baked wholemeal sourdough toast with an exceptionally pulled strong flat white, set against a Roc Marciano record, is one of life’s great, somewhat accessible, realistic pleasures.

The mockery of Millennials spending on hospitality seems to stem from an outdated mindset entrenched in economic rationalism. An economic rationalist sees the individual as being logical, calculated, and in complete control of themself and their desires when faced with unregulated free markets that push and pull them in all directions. An economic rationalist asks, “why complain about not owning a home if you spend $6 on a flat white?” But they don’t account for the nature of desire and how much desire is woven into both economics and our experiences of everyday life. They don’t factor in that smaller spend on trivial, atmospheric, immaterial commodities can provide the most emotional relief or meaningful connection in times of stress and pain.

Pleasure plays a powerful part in dictating behaviour. Hence why some of us may choose the affective café with exceptional, velvety, woody, smoky coffee and perfectly executed bruschetta on handmade ceramic plates, accompanied by John Glacier beats, and Millennial baristas occupying at least an aesthetic, a sense of self, and speaking our language.

Small, trivial pleasures are often the last to go against a litany of high-priority needs. What’s more likely is that the longer-terms pleasures of, say, owning one’s own home fades; the new mattress gets put on hold; the long-awaited holiday is postponed; the accommodation is downgraded; porterhouse is replaced by chuck steak, planning a family is put on hold, the therapist appointment is postponed. The long black sticks around.

At the same time, inflation may have made the hospitality experience more intentional from the perspective of the customer, as their choice of café joints are more thoughtfully selected, and the new establishments themselves more polished and serious in their execution; less taken-for-granted. Those that are empty are likely not the best quality coffee, atmosphere, food, or staff. It’s a $25 steak frites baguette from a heavily curated and well put together culturally imported franchise that is doing well, as opposed to the rundown warehouse space selling $6 egg on rye with an in-house specialty blend coffee. Immaterial qualities, like the affects conjured by Melbourne-style cafés become economic variables weighing into the choices consumers make. Cafés seem to be the ones shouldering the embarrassment of coffee prices going up while the coffee remains unchanged, in turn becoming more architectural, curated, and immaterial experiences.

New café styles and languages are visibly emerging out of what feels like the end of the $2.50 long-black era. The era of sitting on a milk crate down a filthy, beautiful, Melbourne laneway. New York and American style joints seem to be opening in place of what was a distinctly Melbourne vernacular of café. In place of the old gritty Melbourne cafés of the Northern suburbs with second-hand furniture, mismatched saucers and teapot doilies, peeling walls, $2.50 long blacks, scones, and milk crate seats appear less and less. New York sandwich bars with red and white, or blue and white, or just black and white printed wax paper packaging and checked floors seem to be on the up, such like Saul’s Sandwiches, Bala Sanga, Reuben’s Deli, and Nico’s Sandwich Deli. New York-style diners are also opening, along with more fried chicken and donut joints, like Belle’s Diner, Bowery to Williamsburg, Operator 25, Walrus, and Hector’s Deli. As the prices increase and the apparent artisanal quality of the coffee increases, there’s a more overtly curated atmosphere to make-up for the fact that the coffee tastes the same and yet the price in many cases have tripled. But the cultural and immaterial value of the café society in Melbourne was arguably in the romance of the old shitty-ness of it: broken tables on uneven, crooked, often unspeakably filthy laneways.

Paradoxically, cafés are needed even more in this unforgiving monetary and social climate that chides us for our spending habits. Life can be paused in cafés. Cities can be defined by their cafés. In many ways, the original Melbourne café has encoded itself as home to the economically abandoned generation — an unspoken nod to Millennials who may as well double down on seemingly frivolous purchases. Who may as well go to the café if they’re never going to buy a house — but it has to be the café that feels like a home.