This retro cafe is all about ’90s vibes and honest food with 101 per cent heart

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Did you know the 96 tram takes you to the Sunshine Coast? Oh, and it’s a time machine too: it pulls up in about 1994. That’s the vibe at Suntop Plaza, a cafe at the Brunswick East light rail terminus. The fonts on the awning and side walls are cheery retro signals and the central front door spills you into the guts of the room. You’re instantly amongst it, with counters that coast through the space and benches that wrap around the walls, as though joinery could hug you.

The apricot-coloured walls are like a sunset that sticks around for hours, the kind that lulls you into that sweet, swollen feeling that the world is benevolent, even if just for now.

There’s a Hills Hoist out back that’s always drying nanna’s best tea towels, and the place smells like cake and cookies and filter coffee and alfalfa sprouts.

Suntop is run with 101 per cent heart by hospitality lifer Melissa “Murph” Murphy, whose parents owned a cafe at Suntop Plaza shopping mall in Noosa Heads. She’s probably cooked for you at some point over the past couple of decades, at pubs including the Standard and Grace Darling and winery Noisy Ritual. Her collaborator is old mate Joey “1800 Lasagne” Kellock, who had always loved this site.

Murph had been slogging it out here on her own for a while and it was tough: she told Kellock she might need to let the place go. Five minutes before the landlord was about to whisk away the keys, Kellock took a bagful of cash to the bank. Suntop rose the next day.

We’ll get to the sandwiches and cakes – that’s all the food and it’s all great – but we need to talk about the feeling: warm, welcoming, engaged. This is a cafe driven by honest intention, empathy and the clarity that comes from long, hard years working in restaurants.

There’s a focus on affordability. The sandwiches could be bigger, but then they’d need to be more than $12. They could be more complicated, too, but Murph probably isn’t the only one among us who just wants something high-quality and wholesome to eat, not an extravagant brunch that hits your body like a left hook.

Murph is most likely floating around while you’re here, sunny and all-seeing, but if she’s not piling meatloaf and cheese and sprouts and iceberg into sourdough rolls, she’s out the back poaching chicken in yesterday’s stock, making mayonnaise and salsa verde and six trays of chocolate chip cookies, perhaps baking a Basque cheesecake that’s as fluffy as it’s supposed to be or a chocolate cake that slumps in the best possible way.

The coffee – espresso or batch – is tip-top and juice is cold-pressed in house. There’s nothing complicated about the offering but the simplicity is central to the excellence. Suntop Plaza is an urban interlude that leaves you as soul-nourished and relaxed as a beachy getaway.