Am I clubbing or brunching???

Over the course of my life I seem to be moving further out of the CBD, I guess it's a natural progression which will end up one day with a general store in some rural town. But I'm not quite there yet. I started in St Kilda and still recall when brunch was just a meal and not a social event, going to the Galleon with my Mum and brother and eating home-made Spanakopita and their famous rice pudding.

That was before you had to write your name down, spend 20 minutes out the front of the next door laundry and then squeeze in for a table. I was astonished to hear that a very good friend's job was to essentially be a door-bitch at a famous South Melbourne cafe on weekends, and was even more blown away to see they had opened up an "overflow" cafe on the opposite side of the street. I drove past Three Bags Full in Richmond at midday three weeks ago and thought there'd been a natural disaster such was the length of the line of poached egg craving brunchers.

Lines, door-bitches, exclusivity and fashion - it's all sounding a bit like a South Yarra nightclub. The 60's/70's had LSD, the 80's/90's had cocaine, and we now have hollandaise.

Los Chicas on a Sunday morning is a body-bag filled war-zone, slipping into Batch for a quick coffee and a muffin at 12:30pm on a Saturday is a Jihadist's suicide mission with no guarantee of martyrdom and a foccaccia at my old favourite The Wall early Sunday afternoon could make you feel like an Australian soldier endlessly waiting for orders to evacuate Afghanistan.

So what does this mean for us? I say avoid the crowds and discover your local area. I started with nearby McKinnon and came across a couple of real hidden gems. I'll share them with you - but if I have to write my name down to go back to these secret places, I'll kill you all.

1. Relish Food Store (256 McKinnon Road, McKinnon). Reasonable coffee but really simple, quality breakfast. We had the "Eggs McKinnon" which had everything you need - poached eggs, bacon, hollandaise, avocado on rye. See Photo 1.

2. Mr Burch (124 McKinnon Road, McKinnon). Excellent coffee, great little place, menu requires careful selection - we had a hit and a miss. Photo 2 above was a hit, crunchy bacon, beautifully poached eggs served on a brioche with creamy hollandaise.

I've also included photos from Friends of Mine in Richmond, which has massive line-up potential but has lots of tables and we didn't wait. Great coffee, I had a Bubble and Squeak Corn Beef hash with spinach and a poached egg which was a wholesome hearty breakfast dish (see photo 3). My companion had photo 4 which is self-explanatory and gave it a big thumbs up, especially the mushrooms.