Food Republic

Tom Wolfe called them status details – the "everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration … through which people express their position in the world or what they think it is or what they hope it to be". And there they were, in Blackburn, ranked outside this suburban cafe that shares its shopping centre with an optometrist, a hearing clinic, a travel agent and a beauty therapist. Not milk crates, and not those old primary school chairs with stiff backs and hard bottoms they make you sit on in Northcote, but chunky woven cafe chairs like the cafe chairs you see massed on the boulevards of Paris. What a signifier.

"French provincial" is the decor descriptor in the Food Republic's running with, and milk crates is not the only inner-city checkbox left unchecked. There are no hanging Edison bulbs, no filter coffee, no distressed concrete. The cafe is spacious and lit by full-length windows and thronging with locals.

The menu is divided into breakfast, brunch and lunch, with a pretty clear demarcation in expectations. Breakfast is a choice among toast, bircher and quinoa porridge, though eggs get their own (all-day) section – on toast any way you like, a la benedict, in a superfood omelette with the hitherto unacknowledged superfoods broccoli, red peppers, sweet potato and feta.

Some of the lunch offerings say "golf club" more than "Melbourne cafe 2015": big batons of battered barramundi served with fat chips and aioli mayo (a popular choice); penne with chicken, pesto and zucchini ribbons; a 250-gram eye fillet with baked sweet potato.

But the Asian chicken salad – a juicy fillet drizzled with sweet chilli and served on a toss of shaved red cabbage, wombok, herbs and peanuts – appeals to more contemporary tastes, and a flatbread pizza special of spinach, napoli sauce, feta, red pepper and rocket comes as a rectangle.

Other specials – retailed by a neatly trimmed waiter with a slick ponytail and well-controlled facial hair – might include cream of mushroom soup with caramelised leek and rosemary and organic toast; open tortillas with poached chicken, kidney beans and salsa; and 40-hour smoked salmon, pleasantly fishy, and served with creamy scrambled eggs shot through with dill on an open-sandwich-style toasted Noisette croissant for a  tasty brunch.

Served open sandwich-style is a pulled lamb roll on a toasted baguette that's been smeared with mustard pickles (a bit reminiscent of a yellow relish) and piled up with rocket. The lamb is tender, but the flavour is just lamby: it needed a lick of charcoal from a wood-fired spit or a little Middle-Eastern spice treatment to lift it into truly tasty.

Service is polite, brisk, not-quite-formal, and coffee is two house-roasted blends – one bold, one mild. The bold is dark and toasty with an ashy finish, the mild (a Sumatran) tasty and sweeter, though whatever fruit it harboured was masked by the roast.

And on a sunny day those French provincial chairs out front were joined by a couple of plastic sun lounges spread on the fake turf. What status they signify, I'm not sure – unless it's optimism on an autumn afternoon in this corner of the Eastern suburbs rain belt.

Do… come for Friday evening drinks and tapas
Don't… miss the kids' menu: cheese and pineapple toasty
Dish… Asian chicken salad
Vibe ... Slick, suburban bowling club