LuxBite

Back to restaurant reviews
38 Toorak Road, South Yarra, 9867 5888

My score: 4/5

LuxBite is a dessert cafe in South Yarra, a suburb where sweet-tooth emporia and teeth-whitening clinics seem to operate in roughly equal numbers. The talented owners, Bernard Chu and Yen Yee, worked the pastry stations at restaurants including Rockpool, Quay and Comme before opening their own sleek, petite pleasure dome in 2010. LuxBite is deservedly beloved for its east-meets-west macarons (pandan, say, or Kaffir lime) and superbly outlandish cakes but should also be celebrated for its Malaysian-style savoury snacks and brunches. When a pastry chef’s fanatical rigor is applied to scrambled eggs they will be the most jiggly, creamy curds you’re ever likely to eat.

The brunch menu is small but the dishes are sublime, mixing Malaysian and European elements with inspired and purposeful effect. Satay-marinated chicken leg is turmeric-tinged, crisp-skinned and as juicy as an overripe tomato. It pulls easily from the bone into soft, creamy polenta rimmed by burnt butter sauce. Salty crunch comes courtesy of anchovies and peanuts, rumbled together in a jammy version of ikan bilis, a dried anchovy condiment. Chicken also features alongside lap cheong (Chinese pork sausage) in a sticky rice dish that’s so hearty and full-flavoured I was afraid it would overwhelm my dessert stomach. Luckily, it’s tempered by a crunchy iceberg lettuce and cucumber salad with a palate-rousing peppery citrus dressing. Braised beef is textbook comfort food, resting on soft bacon and potato mash, and topped with a fried egg with a wok-style crisp fringe.

The small dining room and elaborate cake display mean this isn’t your average brunch hangout. If you want the bathroom, you need to trot two minutes away to a local park. Perhaps that’s a good thing, because a comfort interlude may renew an appetite for dessert. I am not the world’s biggest macaron fan but LuxBite’s sour strawberry flavour could be the one to turn me. I need no such persuasion with their delightfully over-the-top cakes: I’m fully on board with the seven-layer Lolly Bag Cake (a MasterChef 2013 brainbuster) and the gluten-free Meringue Monster with its green tea sponge and watermelon yoghurt innards. Should you want dessert without dental or dietary implications, LuxBite also sells cake-scented candles for sugar-free swooning.

See their website.

More Malaysian brunch:

Killiney Kopitiam, 114 Lygon Street, Carlton, 9650 9880 (also 108 Bourke Street, Melbourne)
The Singapore-style snacks and meals here are popular with students, especially the kaya toast (coconut jam and slabs of butter on white bread).

Orient East, 348 St Kilda Road, Melbourne, 9685 2900
The house restaurant for Seasons Botanic Gardens hotel covers many bases with its interesting menu. Dishes include congee, kaya toast, crepe with pork floss and Chinese doughnut, and good old eggs-any-way on sourdough.

Tom Phat, 182-184 Sydney Road, Brunswick, 9381 2374
It’s not strictly Malaysian (or strictly anything) but the pan-Asian weekend breakfast menu includes roti omelettes and black sticky rice with jaggery yoghurt.

First published in The Age, March 30, 2014.