Wide Open Road

Like a few other reviewers, I have my moments when it comes to this place.
The décor is great and the coffee is pretty spectacular.
The food, when you get it, is extremley good.
The service is a bit hit and miss and on two consecutive visits, the orders didn’t show up with doggie bags offered.
On the second occasion, after watching later diners have their orders taken and then served, I lost my cool as we had waited over 30 minutes for the food which was sitting under the heat lamps for the best part of 20 mins. Only one of the coffees turned up, and we had to go get our own water — which sound pretentious, but the staff normally bring the water over and take the coffee order.
I watched our food sit on the serving area for over 20 minutes. (along with other plates) I watched the wait staff glance at the food and then pick up the newer orders.
We got up and advised the head waitress that we were leaving sans food.
She offered to pack the food that had been sitting there in a doggie bag! Meh!
Not interested in a salad that’s been sitting under heat lamps for over 20 minutes.
I did pass on my comments to the management and I received a prompt reply which was good.
We reluctantly returned a few days later with a family member and there was a complete turn-​around! Same head waitress who was running around, same lengthy queue, but different wait staff which made such a huge difference. The coffee and food came out quickly and suddenly it was like WOR of old.
Would I return? Probably, but I’ll be picking my times.

Wide Open Road is like that friend you’ve had since you were a kid. They are always there when you need them, they provide support in times of need, they don’t mind how you look or who you’re dating, they just want to make you happy. They don’t have hour-​long waits on the weekends (the analogy has ended at this point). You know who never lets you down? Wide Open Road.
They take their coffee very seriously here at Wide Open Road, so much so that there is a coffee menu, which makes me feel like a total dork when all I order is a skinny flat white.
But for me, it’s all about the food. I always tend to go for the healthier option when it comes to breakky (I tend to get less healthy as the day goes on) so on past occasions have treated myself to the Bircher Muesli and the Cauliflower Quinoa Fritters. Both delicious and filling.
Sometimes, yes, you will be asked to wait a few minutes for a seat but PLEASE don’t leave in a huff of disgust. I have never had to wait more than three minutes even when they’ve threatened us with twenty. The staff here are so bloody efficient and friendly I basically want to move in.

As a brunswick local it has taken me way too long to get here. I walk past every time i go to the gym and think «i must come here». Finally, i ventured in one rainy morning for a coffee. It is much bigger than i thought inside and i really like the warehouse/​factory type décor. Definitely i can imagine on a sunny day the room would be beautifully lit. We only came in for a coffee and it was pleasing to see that they had a good coffee menu that a coffee novice like me can understand. Often at specialty coffee places you kind of have to know what you want to be able to order. Here they specify the different blends and make it easy to decide. I ordered a cold drip coffee which was delicious. Whilst i didn’t eat, the menu looked pretty decent and had some vegan options. Will definitely come back here again.

I recently discovered, like its name would suggest, that Wide Open Road is large and spacious (so can accommodate groups of more than 3 people… which is a rarity to find in brunswick…) and gets a great breeze through the whole restaurant, perfect for Melbourne summer days.
It’s also off Sydney Road, so even though it is always busy, you can normally get a table without a heinous wait, which, again is a rarity on Sydney Road.
Lots of the breads and yummy treats are baked on-​site, and they’re delicious. Of note is the pumpkin bread that is served with the baked cauliflower sandwich. There are lots of interesting combinations on the menu, such as the wild boar sausage served with bocconcini and a pomegranate legume salad. They also mix sweet and savoury in surprising ways that usually work out well, such as a citrus cous cous salad.
Overall, a very trendy café with a fun hipster ambiance in the heart of brunswick. Definitely worth checking out.

I’ve been here at least a dozen times and the food has always been impressive. It’s nicely presented, in good portions and tasted very good.
I am not particularly impressed with the coffee though or the beans they use to be precise. Even as a double shot it doesn’t have enough flavour for me.
Still I keep coming back for the food.

If you wear frames with no glass in them, have a beard or ride a fixy then you’ll love this place.

I’m not quite sure what to say about Wide Open Road. Some days I absolutely love it and other days I’m so disappointed. The hope that it’s going to be a good day is what keeps me coming back.
The menu changes often and the food is fantastic, so is the coffee. The décor of the place is beautiful, would kill for the beautiful glass lamps that they bave in different pastel colors.
My biggest concern is the service which most of the time is below average, orders get mixed up and the staff doesn’t check up on you often enough. There’s definitely room for improvement here.

My favourite local for over 2 years.
Constantly changing menu which is always a reason to come back, usually a new special as well.
Filter coffee is consistently great and iced filter is my favourite drink in summer.
Staff are always helpful, friendly and attentive, even on the super busy weekends.

Great breakfast spot. If you want a taste of Melbourne, look no further.
High quality ingredients, amazing drip coffee, cool atmosphere.

I am going to take you through a step-​by-​step review of this lovely and very hipster café.
Ambiance: This café is hipster/​10. From the light wood to the copper piping, from those strange lights hanging from the ceiling to the Chet Faker on the surround sound, from slightly-​suggestible side alley to the customers enjoying their double ristretto, low fat, soy lattés with half sugar. It is a hipsters dream.
Menu: it made me a little sad to realise that I could (should) only choose one of the delicious options available to me. I ended up going for a kind of exotic fruit salad on the specials menu and congratulated myself on my excellent decision. Besides being delicious, it was the first time I’ve come across crushed ice and mint together. It really added that extra kick to the salad. You can’t go wrong with any item on the menu here.
Coffee: they’ve got everything that you could be looking for. Single origin, blend, cold/​ice drip, filter. Whatever you are after in your little cup of delicious necessity, they’ em got you covered. You can even take a bag home if you would like. My personal recommendation is the Costa Rica when it is on. Gotta love that touch of hazelnut.
Staff: the crew know exactly what they are doing. As soon as I had a foot in the door, I was offered a place to sit and a detailed description of the today’s roasts. The service was possibly a little too good as it made me feel as if I was taking too long to decide on what to eat. Although, once I did, the salad was in front of me within 5mins.
Wide Open Road know exactly what they are doing. They are a well-​experienced café with amazing coffee and they require you to pay them a visit ASAP.

This spunky venue is a roastery and café housed in a two-​storey converted warehouse that features roasting facilities, green bean storage and a cupping room. FYI cupping is a coffee tasting technique used by cuppers to evaluate coffee aroma and the flavor of a coffee. It’s also used to evaluate a defective coffee, or to create coffee blends.
Their menu is small, but seasonal. It’s all-​day breakfast and lunch that is served ’til 4pm. Produce is fresh and vibrant on the plate, and food combinations are impressive. It’s certainly not your average café when it comes to meals. They’ve even sexed up the side orders with things like gruyère potato cakes, mushrooms with dukkah and house smoked trout.
The interior is like oh so hipster, and random things like rusty supermarket trolleys adorn the walls. It’s decked out with share tables and is packed on weekends. A few outdoor tables help ease the over-​crowding, but to really make the most of the experience, visit during a weekday, unless of course crowds are your thing.
Staff are friendly, but can be really slow at bringing out menus, water, setting cutlery and taking orders, and meals have had a tendency to go missing in the kitchen!
A few minor tweaks here and there, and this café will be awesome.

The road well traveled is the motto here… and with good reason! Im a local in the area and I try not to play favourites, but I love this café. Yes it gets very busy with the weekend brunch crowd but the unflappable service and custom hellos — ‘how ya goin’ groovers’ make it easy to go with the flow. They roast their coffee onsite and their chai is delicious and well presented. The menu is fresh and interesting with a middle eastern wink. If you’re looking for a stylish hangover fix the thick cut bacon dish with a poached egg, potato cake, chipotle mayo and out of this world beetroot relish is a thing of beauty.

This is a nice enough café with very friendly staff and a nice open plan area lit up beautifully by the sun. The food is good quality but the main problem in my opinion is the very small menu. There simply arent too many choices.
I had a hot chocolate which was good and a really nice apple, cranberry and quinoa bread, topped with honey and yoghurt — which was absolutely delicious — however I was there with my 3 year old twin boys and they didnt particularly like the bread. They had babycinos but they didnt come with a marshmellow (these things are important to little boys).
While I think the food is wonderful for adults (they make their own bread onsite and their own coffee too), its not really a great menu for kids. That said, why should it be? The place doesnt necessarily want to be marketed at kids or those that have them. Its not anti-​kids or against their presence, its just that the food isnt really what appeals to them — although one of my sons was more than happy to polish off the half of my hot chocolate that I didnt drink (Im on a diet — I didnt leave it for its taste — it tasted nice).
The prices are fair, the food is good, the staff are nice and the space is nice — all they need to do now is get some more variety onto their menu (and maybe a kid-​friendly meal or two) and they will be headed towards 4 stars rapidly!

I love the idea of this place, I love the look of this place, I love the presentation of this place, but I just don’t love this place.
I often say that having coffee and brekky in Brunswick on a Saturday or Sunday morning is like going into battle. You have to be match fit, to push your way through the hoardes to get the waiter’s attention to be told that there is at least half a dozen people in line before you — go stand in the line, and you will be grateful when and if we can give you a table.
Wide Open Road is this place (and it is not the only one in Brunswick).
It used to be fab when it was small, and had a good menu, but now it is very large, very very noisy, and the menu is a bit weird.
The coffee is great, though. Which makes it a place that I still like to go to — sometimes.
I will happily go there on a weekday, when the crowds and the noise are a bit less overwhelming. Or I will go there if I’m with an out of town guest who wants to experience the craziness that is the sport of coffee-​ing in Melbourne, but there are other places I would go also.
So, if you are match fit and ready to rumble — go, and enjoy the great coffee.

I’m terrible at being a regular at cafes — there just seems to be too many of them to go to one consistently these days. That being said, I was not surprised to notice after a number of months’ absence that Wide Open Road had changed their menu.
Although I dearly missed their great hangover fare (hello scrambled eggs with bacon and truffle oil), the menu seems to have taken a few steps more towards trendy brunch options — not a bad thing at all, just different.
Coffee, as always, is spectacular. I am dying to try the iced drip coffee with condensed milk, however the cascara iced tea is the perfect finish to a sunny street-​side lunch.

Wide open road is a great little local café, that has a lovely fresh breakfast and lunch menu. Although I do not drink coffee, I hear that the coffee is pretty good, and they also sell many different blends and single origin coffee beans and ground coffee to take away which is also very good quality.
One thing that I like most about wide open road is that they have more than the stock standard teas on offer. Most cafes only seem to have English breakfast, earl grey, peppermint and camomile on offer, but wide open road also offers a few more black teas which makes the tea drinker in me pretty satisfied.
One thing that I don’t like so much is the crockery that they use to serve their meals — enamel plates with quite a wide raised edge/​lip. It sounds a bit petty, but the plates are often too small for the meals that are served on them and the raised edge makes it tricky to eat using a knife and fork.
Definitely a good café to check out if you are in the area.

I was lured here with the promise of baked eggs in bechamel, which was sure to be the perfect hangover cure. But when I arrived, my friend broke the news to me: the menu had changed. After spending a little time with my head resting on the table, I was finally able to contemplate the menu and decided on the scrambled tofu. I know it is a great leap to go from a rich, dairy-​heavy dish to the vegan choice, and a daring leap to make when hangovers pretty much demand the consumption of animal by-​products, but I did it. And it was a good choice. The tofu is scrambled with finely chopped zucchini and capsicum, and some spinach. Both the texture and flavour is pretty good for a tofu scramble, although I would prefer a bit of chilli to the mix, or some hot sauce available. This comes with some mushrooms (one friend of mine claimed the mushrooms here were so good that she had to have a second serve — they are pretty good, seasoned with tasty things like cumin and roasted nicely, but I actually don’t think they are two-​serve worthy… she was clearly just really hungry) and avocado, and a very tasty seedy sourdough. The coffee is good and the service for a Sunday morning that was getting increasingly busy was actually pretty prompt. I also quite like the airy warehouse décor. Had there been bechamel eggs on the menu, I probably would have given this four stars. There’s something about eating animal by-​products that makes me more generous.

Agree with everything Emma C says… I’ve been three times, and every time I have been getting less likely to return for breakfast.
Great fit out, cool patrons, good mix on the menu, good coffee and very popular, but I’m not number one ticket hlder or president of the WideOpenRoadFoodFanClub. Given the choice of here or Residential Kitchen a few hundered metres away, I’d go there.
Worth a look, it may be your thing, it may not. It’s trendy, but I have been left feeling a little flat afterwards. For me the highlight id the restoration going on out the bak of the Kitchen; if you go to the toilest you’ll see what I mean.

Love to indulge in a bit of hipster spotting whilst sipping on house roasted coffee, anyway you like it? Then suss out Wide Open Road.
Named The Age Café Guide’s ‘Best New Café’ of 2011, Wide Open Road have since done a significant expansion, adding an extra 50 seats and a commercial kitchen.
A huge warehouse-​y space, the fit out is very industrial-​chic, and totally in-​keeping with the area and the patrons.
The food is ok-​ish. Could be better for the price, compared to what some other locals are serving up.
The coffee is really where Wide Open Road gets their four stars from me. Always consistent, quick and delicious.

Fantastic little (now bigger) café in Brunswick, great coffee, great fit out and great people