Car Park Cafe

There are plenty of cafes touting for tired-shopper trade in Camberwell. The sparkling new Brunetti on Prospect Hill Road is hard to beat for gelati or cakes. The stalwart Chocolate Box on Burke Road has been selling its sweet somethings for 50 years. Up the hill, Tom's Deli does nice lunches. Nearby Coffee Max probably does the strip's best brew. But as an all-rounder, Car Park Cafe is the pick of the bunch. The cafe changed hands a month ago for the first time in 13 years and it's already picked up the pace without upsetting its many regulars.

The car park location, behind the east side of Burke Road, doesn't make for pretty views but it does mean you can throw your shopping into the boot then stagger back for a snack. Boosting the Car Park Cafe's credentials are its warm welcome, flexible menu, good comfort food and decent coffee. Sit outside with the smokers under yellow umbrellas or inside where jaunty model aeroplanes hang from the ceiling, swaying in a fan-forced breeze. The rear of the cafe has booths and a magazine rack. There's room for prams, though there are no highchairs or change tables.

Diners order and pay at the counter from a hotchpotch menu of cafe basics and Italian meals. There's a counter stacked with cookie jars, pizza squares and cakes. There's a focaccia and salad menu. Breakfast offerings, scrawled on a whiteboard, are available all day. Fruit salad at 8am, spinach omelette and fresh juice at noon, French toast at 5.30pm? No problem. The sandwiches are good - especially the well-proportioned chicken, cheese, avocado and mayonnaise toasted focaccia. A green salad was simple but fresh, with a jaunty vinaigrette and no brown edges on the lettuce, though I didn't love the mushy olives. The coffee was a bit thin but it did the trick.

Car Park Cafe's hot dishes really set it apart. When my enormous vegetarian lasagne hit the table, I began rehearsing a request to take my leftovers home. Ten minutes later I'd cleared the plate. The lasagne was not fancy or delicate but it was delicious. Big, sweet pumpkin pieces, heaps of spinach, a swamp of house-made napoli and nuggets of ricotta all combined to create an unself-conscious plate of feel-good food. The chef, Frankie DiMattina, cooks at an open kitchen behind the counter. His calamari salad and chicken risotto are also popular: the cafe's hum is often punctuated by the waiters' cry of "compliments to the chef" as yet another cleared plate hits the sink. The cakes are bought but the conical muffins are made there. I like the choc-orange variety, served warm to melt the chocolate.

New owner Bryan Wood played footy for Richmond and Essendon in the 1970s and '80s, then worked in real estate. In fine ex-footballer tradition, he's now moved into hospitality. He's running Car Park Cafe in partnership with another footy family, the DiMattinas (Society, Blue Train, Il Gambero), which explains the arrival of the chef from Il Gambero in Carlton. Anyone who gets a Christmas present from me this year should send a thankyou Frankie's way because it's his lasagne that gave me the courage and energy to plunge into the retail fray.