Smiths Beach General Store has been part of Phillip Island for as long as people have been driving down to surf the south coast. Thirty-odd years as the kiosk you'd stop at for a paper, a sausage roll, a bag of ice on the way back from the beach. First place open, last place to close.
"The brief is simple. Build on what the kiosk was. Turn it into the kind of cafe people drive down for."
It's in new hands now. Kade, who runs Finally Mine Coffee House in Traralgon, has taken over with a small team and a bigger plan. The bones of the place are right. The light is honest. The location does most of the work. What needed doing was a sharper coffee program, a full kitchen, and the kind of consistency that means a Sunday driver and a 6am surfer get the same thing pulled the same way.
What we're keeping
The muffins. The bacon and egg rolls. The sausage rolls, same recipe, baked here. The Friday-night fish and chips. The newspapers. The feel of a place that still knows its regulars.
What we're sharpening
Properly pulled coffee, every time, on a Synesso S300 V2. Fresh bread from local Bass Coast bakeries, in by 7am. House-made everything — pies, sandwiches, the daily specials. A small pantry range, but every product on the shelf for a reason.
What we're building
A full kitchen menu with breakfast and lunch cooked to order, seasonal specials on the board, and the room to sit and stay a while. The kiosk didn't have space for this. The cafe does.
The beach is still the point
This isn't a destination cafe with a queue. It's a corner that serves people heading down the path with their boards under their arm, families on a Saturday driving down for the day, locals who've been coming here for thirty years. Everything we do is in service of that. We open at 7. We close when the last car leaves.