Australia. Never been, not minded to. The wildlife alone could kill you, to borrow an old cliché about Terra Australis: box jellyfish, the funnel-web spider, the eastern brown snake. But this isn’t something to fret over: after three meals of modern Australian “café” fare a day, I might welcome their attempts on my life. No, it is not the fauna but the food, the paintings, the poetry, the romance, and lack thereof, that repels.
Besides, you don’t need to go to Australia to have your fill of Australians. Try an F45 class (a kind of fitness programme for the swivel-eyed, self-hating, monstrously puritanical cardio freaks in your life) in Dalston, E8. You can’t move – or complete your high-intensity interval training circuit – for the Strine dialect. The “Down Under” physiognomy is conspicuous too: men with mullets, moustaches, one-hoop earrings and complexions that imply a lifetime of nourishment by the sun and the beach. How dare they, first of all.
And not content with a full human invasion of London’s BoBo neighbourhoods (latest estimates suggest there are about 165,000 of them in the UK), Australia might soon export its carnivorous dentates (big word, look it up) to our waters. “Could the warming North Sea attract great white sharks?” the Guardian asks. Meanwhile, researchers at the Global White Shark Project – cool job for a seven-year-old boy – think they could be here already. The invasion is nearly total.
Anyway, yes – food column. Antipodeans have made their mark on the culinary topography of the city. London is burdened, groaning, chocka with Australian cafés – Granger & Co has four outposts here; there is Milk Beach in Soho and Bondi Green in the Paddington Basin (imagine coming all 17,016km from Sydney to end up in the Paddington Basin?!); Lantana in London Bridge, Fitzrovia and Shoreditch; and Barbie Green in the City. There are countless more because how else to feed those healthy, well-exercised Aussies?
You will know the score by now: flat whites, almond milk, avocado toast (sometimes rendered “smashed avo” in a fit of cringe rhetorical taste), corn fritters, bircher muesli, granola, ricotta hotcakes, all served with a further, optional side of avocado. Granger & Co in King’s Cross sits me at the bar – who the hell wants to sit at a bar for breakfast? – before practically pelting, pillorying and drowning me with the fruit. At another, far less accomplished iteration of the Australian café I spot a hemp-seed muffin. It looks like something you might feed a donkey on his birthday.
Then there’s the shared look (vibe? Aesthetic? Whichever word you prefer) excavated straight from the frontal cortex of a 2013 millennial: blush pink, peach, faux-marble, brass fixtures. I thought the world had moved on, but there is a queue out the door and, I suspect, acres more avocado orchards to be cultivated and reaped for hungry and credulous Londoners.
I wouldn’t mind – despite my tone, I rather like Australians – but Australia’s neocolonial potency does not end with their own shopfronts. It has infected the British menu too. “Mashed avocado with confit tomato on wholemeal toast,” at the otherwise hyper-Anglo Wolseley, or three variations on the theme at the UK chain The Breakfast Club. Must we? Britain, creator of the world’s greatest breakfast, has for too long been awash with bland toast and self-regarding muesli invented in and imported from ’Straya. (My thesaurus is running out of steam here.)
I do not understand what process of culinary exchange has led us here. London, the most cosmopolitan city in the world, is no stranger to the food of immigrants. Not to sound too Kumbaya but strength in diversity, and all that pap. The Aussification is unusual, though: they have marched into Europe and declared their breakfast imperium. England’s capitulation to the Flat White Industrial Complex (invented in Australia, so they claim) is just further evidence of a once-powerful now-enfeebled realm.
At least I can save money on the flights: £1,051 on Air Emirates, with a layover in Delhi? No need. We have a perfectly good “Aussie brekkie” (ugh) at home – and none of the imagination to fight back.
[Further reading: Nigel Farage’s oyster politics]
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This article appears in the 10 Sep 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The World According To Ed
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Subscribe here to commentWhat a sneering, nasty article. You do realise most of the cafes you’ve named are all part of the same chain? For what it’s worth, I’ve never been to Australia either but I tried a flat white in 2015 and have never looked back. God-tier coffee.