Rombe rooftop cafe at Burwood Brickworks adds fine dining touches to brunches – MASHAHER

Dining is topsy-turvy these days. Thursday seems to be the new Friday. Eating at 5pm is the new 8pm. And if Rombe is any indication, brunch must be the new dinner. How else to make sense of this delightful fine-dining experience on a sunny spring morning?

I’m sitting in a spacious, airy dining room in a rooftop garden with views to the Dandenong Ranges. Friendly, engaged waiters get the day rolling. The menu is dotted with prestige preparations: hot curry butter, “thousand layer” potatoes, pastrami-crusted sirloin steak. What has brunch come to? Can I have more?

This impressive cafe is at Burwood Brickworks, Melbourne’s most pleasant shopping centre, with impressive sustainability credentials. Bird calls are piped through the carpark. The build feels tactile and human-scale. Solar panels provide the centre’s energy and grey water is treated on site. The rooftop is a community garden and some produce ends up at Rombe, which overlooks rows of cabbages and carrot tops.

A cafe first opened here in 2019 but it didn’t survive the 2020 headwinds. What did happen was that three friends who live locally met on the rooftop for lockdown strolls. Sam Miao and Karen Wang lamented their shuttered wedding business. Robin Yu was sad about the cafes he had long worked in.

Brunch must be the new dinner, if Rombe is any indication.

They concocted a plan to take over the empty premises and turn it into a cafe that could also host functions. Rombe opened this March. (In July, the trio opened Baked Wonder next door, a more casual experience for indulgent pastries such as a signature pink croissant.)

Chef Emma Jeffrey was engaged to design the menu. She’s probably Melbourne’s smartest cafe consultant: if you’ve had the pleasure of getting messy in Murrumbeena with Levi’s hot chicken roll then you know what I mean.

Jeffrey worked with head chef Jerry Yi (ex-Paradise Valley Hotel and Shihuishi at Hotel Sorrento) to bring the food to life.

Yi brings dinner aesthetics and detail to suburban brunch. You see it in the vadouvan poached eggs, drizzled with spiced ghee and garnished with zaatar over herbed carrot puree and lemon labne.

It’s there in the rainbow salad, a lovely tower of beetroot, miso-pickled pumpkin, freekeh and peanut butter-laced hummus.

You feel it in the pastrami-spiced cured salmon, served with horseradish from the garden. Have the salmon as a side or the majestic plated version with that thousand-layer potato.

Pastry chef Tina Huang crafts extraordinary cakes, domed wonders with mousse fillings and pristine glazes. My coffee miso caramel creation transported me to a top patisserie, even as I perched atop Melbourne’s nicest brickworks.