Melbourne café smashed avocado on sourdough with chilli flakes, lemon, sea salt and microherbs
Origin: Melbourne, Australia
From the journey of Avocado.
Avocado toast has the distinction of being the only breakfast dish to have triggered a global debate about generational economics. In 2017, an Australian property developer publicly suggested that young people were unable to afford houses because they were spending their money on avocado toast, and the comment ignited a cultural firestorm that the dish (honestly, a piece of toast with smashed avocado) could not possibly have anticipated and does not deserve. But it tells you something true about what avocado toast had become: a symbol of a lifestyle, an aesthetic, a set of values around food, pleasure, and daily spending that was identifiable enough to generate a generational argument. The preparation itself originated in Melbourne in the mid-1980s, at the intersection of Australia's café culture (the most sophisticated in the Southern Hemisphere, built on Italian immigrant coffee traditions and a produce abundance that Britain could not match) and the California avocado industry's overflow into Pacific markets. The chef and food writer Bill Granger popularised it in Sydney in the 1990s with a version at his restaurant bills in Darlinghurst, and the Australian café export of the 2000s and 2010s, when Australian-trained baristas and café operators opened in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo, carried it everywhere. The dish that resulted, in its canonical Melbourne-café form, is a study in quality over complexity: thick sourdough bread, toasted until the surface shatters, spread with ripe smashed avocado, dressed with lemon, good olive oil, dried chilli flakes, and flaked sea salt. Optional additions (a poached egg, crumbled feta, dukkah, microherbs, pickled radish) have accumulated around the central preparation like barnacles, each addition reflecting the café culture of its decade. The original, stripped to its essentials, needs none of them.
Optional additions that have become canonical in different cities: a poached egg (universally popular, especially in Sydney); crumbled Danish feta (Melbourne); dukkah (an Egyptian spiced nut blend) sprinkled over the avocado (a Melbourne innovation that spread worldwide); pickled thin-sliced radish or cucumber; and a thin smear of labneh or ricotta under the avocado (Middle Eastern-influenced cafés in Sydney and Melbourne). Each is a legitimate variation. The base preparation without additions is the original and requires only that the bread, avocado, and olive oil be of the best available quality.
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