Cobb Lane

Matt Forbes first caught Melbourne's eye a few years back with the custard-filled doughnuts and Oreo-style peanut butter and cardamom cream cookies he supplied to the city's hip cafes for their customers to take with their double shot flat whites and pourovers.

The young English pastry chef was up before dawn most days, baking the stuff in a rented commercial kitchen and making the early morning deliveries himself.

Eighteen months ago he opened Cobb Lane in Yarraville, where a crew of half a dozen bustles about a tiny open kitchen, baking bread and pastries and cooking a neat all-day menu of breakfasts and lunches that draw on Forbes' Brit heritage and great Australian produce in equal measure.

It's a 24-hour operation, notes Forbes, who has just become a father for the first time. As if baking wasn't enough. Thankfully, the crowd in the kitchen is about to thin, with a dedicated bakery opening nearby this month for the wholesale business.

"We're having a big shift around to make a more work-friendly environment for the cafe and focus on the food," he says. The shift will make room for four more seats in the cosy 26-seater, too.

The single-page menu is studded with surprises, such as a spanner crab omelette ($18.50) with mornay, house-made relish and watercress served on house-baked toast, or creamed corn and kipflers ($18), a big plate with a puddle of sweet, creamy and delicious corn surrounding a hunk of toasted seedy sourdough piled with chunks of gently roasted kipfler, corn kernels and a scatter of shoots and herbs. A poached duck's egg – the yolk runny, the white firmer than a hen's egg – adds a rich protein hit.

The menu might be seasonal – the corn appears when there's plenty in the market, and Forbes says mushrooms will be on soon – but as far as locals are concerned, the season for the British Breakfast ($18.50) lasts all year round: there's no way you could take it off the menu, he says.

It's a careful assembly of bacon, black pudding and a scotch egg. The black pudding and the bacon are from Pacdon Park, a specialist British smallgoods producer at Moama, on the Murray. The black pudding is nicely dry and savoury-spicy with an almost paté-like flavour, while the bacon is thick cut with plenty of chewy rind, and the scotch egg features a just-set yolk inside the herby-meaty shell. A little slice of brioche rarebit is nicely cheesy, and there's a fruity house-made HP sauce that's more like chutney than the brown sauce from a bottle.

The doughnuts are still here, in wild flavours such as orange blossom and blueberry or mandarin marmalade and chocolate custard ($4.50). And you can wash it all down with specialty tea from Somage – a pot of Wild Ancient Black ($5) – or a cup of filter-brewed coffee – maybe a Burundi Muruta ($3.50) from Small Batch.