My Other Brother
586 Burke Rd
Camberwell, VIC 3124
enter at rear
(03) 9804 0155

On the wrong side of Burke Rd facing the carpark home to the Sunday Camberwell Market is My Other Brother. The food is your usual Melbourne brunch fare, with owner Julien Moussi’s mum making the labneh for some of the dishes. The coffee is top notch, available either cold drip, filter, syphon, or V60 pourover as well as your usual offerings using the house blend Moody Sister. Talk about keeping it in the family.

You may recognise the space as the former Carpark Cafe, but it’s had a facelift. With the capacity to fit over 100 patrons, the space is bright and airy, with your typical Melbourne styling: pale timber, white subway tiles, and a large central table for communal dining.

The menu too is typical Melbourne, with plenty of fan favourites like the ‘McBrother’ (a gourmet version of the McMuffin similar to Porgie’s), or smashed avocado with grilled mushrooms on sourdough. But the problem with copying others is that it leaves you open to comparison, and sadly The Annoying Brother incarnation falls just short of the benchmark.

It’s the same story for the corn and haloumi fritters with smoked salmon and avocado: not a bad dish but you can find better. The optional poached egg is perfectly cooked, and the salmon and avocado do their bit, but the fritters are stodgy, leaving a crumbled mess on the plate after a few mouthfuls, while the haloumi is MIA.

With a menu that aims to please everyone, of course there’s bircher museli, but this time it’s with apple and rhubarb, topped with pommegranate and chia seeds. Served fashionably in a jar, the museli sits on a thick layer of rhubarb compote, leaving this dish to straddle the line between breakfast and dessert, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

It seems Camberwell’s cafes are slowly undergoing a hipster transformation to be more like their northside rivals, but all this copying gives me deja vu. My Other Brother is a decent cafe with good atmosphere and coffee with pretty good food, but lacks originality by Melbourne standards. It’s a carbon copy of all the other popular brunch spots around town. Looks like My Other Brother is a twin.