I've eaten at a lot of Melbourne cafes where "healthy" means a small plate, a big price and a walk home still hungry. Green Tree Cafe is not one of those.
It sits on Glen Eira Road in Elsternwick, a couple of minutes' walk from the station, and it's become the place I point people to when they want to eat out somewhere in Melbourne's south east without the food undoing the rest of their week. The menu leans genuinely healthy without ever being worthy about it, which is a harder balance than it sounds.
The short version: everything we ordered was good, most of it happened to be the kind of food you feel better after rather than worse, and the standout was a piece of avocado toast I'm still thinking about.
What makes it work as a healthy cafe
Plenty of cafes bolt a couple of bowls onto an otherwise heavy menu and call it a day. Green Tree does the opposite. The healthy options aren't the compromise, they're the best things on the menu, and the kitchen clearly puts the same effort into a bowl of greens as into the steak sandwich.
A few things I noticed:
- Vegetables do the heavy lifting. Kale, broccoli, sauerkraut, beetroot hummus, roasted cauliflower, wakame. They're the point of the dish rather than a garnish.
- Dietary needs are properly catered for, not grudgingly. The menu marks vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free and dairy-free options throughout, and a handful of dishes carry a little green heart as the kitchen's own healthier picks.
- The gluten-free stuff is actually good. Which is rarer than it should be, and I'll get to the pancakes.
- Portions are generous. Nothing here felt like a $25 side plate.
| What we ordered | Price | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Avocado on toast | $24 | 10/10 |
| Green smoothie | $12.50 | 9.5/10 |
| Bush lamb | $30 | 8.5/10 |
| Banana pancake (GF) | $25 | 8/10 |
Avocado on toast
10/10 $24The best avo toast I've had, and I don't hand that out lightly. Smashed avocado on sourdough with Persian fetta, roasted beetroot, heirloom tomatoes, goat cheese and pomegranate, with poached eggs added on the side.
What makes it is the balance. There's sweetness from the beetroot and pomegranate, salt from the two cheeses, acidity from the tomato and a herb oil cutting through the middle of it. It's refreshing and light in a way avo toast usually isn't, and it never tips into being one-note or heavy. If you order one thing here, order this.
Bush lamb
8.5/10 $30Sautéed lamb shoulder with roasted cauliflower, kale, green beans, goat cheese, pomegranate and a tahini yoghurt, finished with za'atar and served over roasted sourdough. We added a fried egg.
Lean, and full of flavour. This is the one to get if you want something substantial that still isn't heavy, which is a difficult thing to find at brunch. The lamb is properly seasoned rather than relying on the sauce, and there's enough green on the plate that it eats like a warm salad with meat in it rather than a plate of meat with a garnish.
Banana pancakes (gluten free)
8/10 $25Gluten-free and nut-free, served with mixed berry compote, coconut yoghurt, house-made granola and a caramel drizzle.
I did not expect gluten-free pancakes to be that soft and fluffy. Most GF pancakes give themselves away instantly with a dense, slightly gritty texture, and these genuinely didn't. The compote and coconut yoghurt keep it from being too sweet, so it lands somewhere between breakfast and dessert without committing fully to either. If you're coeliac and used to settling at brunch, this is worth the trip on its own.
Green smoothie
9.5/10 $12.50Spinach, banana, mango, spirulina, avocado, coconut flakes and hemp seeds. On paper that's a lot of competing ingredients, and it somehow worked perfectly together.
Super fresh, properly thick from the avocado rather than from added sweetener, and it doesn't have the chalky spirulina aftertaste that usually ruins these. Easily one of the better green smoothies I've had in Melbourne. You can add a protein boost for $3.
See the visit on Instagram
We filmed it too. Hover to play a preview.
Filmed by @dateswith.linh
What else to order if you're eating healthy
We didn't get to everything, but these are the dishes I'd go back for based on what came out of the kitchen around us:
- Nourish Bowl ($25) — sautéed greens, house sauerkraut, beetroot hummus, mushrooms, broccoli, quinoa and a pomegranate dressing. Vegan, dairy-free, and the most obviously "healthy eating" plate on the menu. Add halloumi or grilled chicken if you want more from it.
- Miso Salmon Bowl ($30) — grilled salmon, house kimchi, cucumber, avocado, wakame and brown rice. The highest-protein thing here, with a scrambled tofu version if you're plant-based.
- Seasonal Greens ($25) — steamed greens with two poached eggs, avocado, hummus, labne, herb salad and almond dukkah.
- Acai Bowl ($22) — buckwheat granola, coconut flakes, chia seeds and seasonal fruit.
- Ayurvedic porridge ($20.50) or black rice pudding ($20) — both lighter breakfast options that aren't just sugar.
- Superpressed Co juices ($8) — kale, celery, lemon and ginger, or watermelon, apple and mint.
On coffee: the house blend is Orthodox by St. Ali, and they use Matcha Maiden for the matcha, Prana for the chai and Golden Grind for the turmeric latte. All good Melbourne roasters and blenders rather than whatever was cheapest, which tells you something about the rest of the kitchen.
The honest caveat
This is a brunch cafe, not a health food shop. There's a steak sandwich, nachos and a full display cabinet of croissants and cakes, and plenty of the menu is straightforwardly indulgent. The point isn't that everything here is healthy, it's that the healthy half of the menu is good enough that you'd order from it by choice rather than by obligation.
Want to remember this one?
Most people find a place like this in a Reel, mean to go, and never think of it again. That's the entire problem RealEats exists to solve, and it's why we built the app around the way people actually discover food.
On any Reel or TikTok, tap Share and pick RealEats. The venue gets saved with its location, rating and photos, straight into a collection you can organise and share with whoever you'd actually go with. The one above is an Elsternwick list with Green Tree in it, alongside a few other local spots worth knowing about.
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Know before you go
Green Tree Cafe
- Address
- 322 Glen Eira Rd, Elsternwick VIC 3185
- Phone
- (03) 9471 0154
- Website
- greentreecafe.com.au
- @greentreecafe__
- Getting there
- A few minutes' walk from Elsternwick station. Outdoor benches on Glen Eira Rd if you want to sit outside.
- Price guide
- Mains roughly $20 to $30. Coffee from $5.20.
- Dietary
- Vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free and dairy-free options across the menu. Worth confirming with staff, since menus change.
- Best for
- Healthy brunch, coeliac-friendly breakfast, a long weekend catch-up.
Menus and prices change, so treat the numbers above as a guide and check their website before you go.
Why we wrote this
RealEats is a food discovery app, and we connect Melbourne venues with local food creators. When one of our creators visits a venue, we publish what they actually thought here, so the content works for the venue long after the reel stops circulating.
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Disclosure: Green Tree Cafe invited our creator in and the meal was complimentary. No payment was made for this article and the venue had no approval over what's written here. The ratings are one creator's honest opinion from a single visit, not an aggregate review score.