Why go
The founder at the Collingwood bench
Coffee comes first for Nolan Hirte, Chef at Proud Mary Coffee in Collingwood, Melbourne, where the original Australian café opened in 2009. His public line through the company is not a single plate or a single brew recipe, but the longer work of building a coffee house into a hospitality business with its own retail, roasting, and café language. Hirte is Australian, co-founder of Proud Mary’s Coffee, owner of Proud Mary Coffee, and now Founder and CEO of Proud Mary Coffee. The Collingwood site is the origin point attached to that story, the Melbourne address from which the name later travelled into the United States through Portland.
The lineage here is company lineage rather than a named apprenticeship. Shari Hirte is part of the founding story at Collingwood, and Nolan Hirte’s role has moved from co-founding into stewardship and leadership. The café still reads through that first decision: coffee as the centre of the room, food as part of the day’s rhythm, and retail beans as a continuation of the cup rather than a side shelf. How long he has stood at any one station inside the Melbourne café is not something the house states. What is stated is more useful to the place itself: Proud Mary began here, in Collingwood, with coffee carrying the weight of the method.
Origin names before shorthand
The program names coffees with the grammar of the trade. Panama Los Lajones Bambu Geisha Washed, Brazil Dois Irmaos Catuai Natural, Colombia Area 18 Castillo Natural, El Salvador La Siberia Red Bourbon Washed, Honduras Nahun Fernandez Parainema Honey, Nicaragua Buenos Aires Maracaturra Washed: the list gives country, farm or project, cultivar, and process before it gives romance. That is the discipline of a specialty café that wants the drinker close to the producer’s work and the roaster’s choices.
The Melbourne operation is tied to roasting in Melbourne, with blends, single-origin coffee, decaf, subscriptions, brewing equipment, and specialty releases sitting around the café service. The house also carries tea as part of the offer, including high-end tea and single estate teas, and the menu reaches beyond the espresso bar into all-day breakfast, lunch, cakes, pastries, fresh juice, and smoothies. Specific extraction gear is not named publicly for the Melbourne room, so the clearer read is the structure of the program: origin-led coffee, a retail shelf that speaks the same language as the bar, and a kitchen broad enough to keep the room working through the day.
The room around the cup
The room in Collingwood has the warmth of a café built for repeat gestures: cups set down at the table, beans chosen for home, breakfast moving into lunch without a change of register. Its design is described as rustic and modern, but the stronger detail is how the place holds several kinds of service at once. There is the counter and the coffee program, the table and the plate, the retail shelf and the brewing tools. None of it needs to announce itself as theatre.
That is the texture of Proud Mary Coffee at its best: a daytime room where the hand behind the cup remains legible. The food gives the coffee time to be considered, and the coffee gives the room its spine. End on the shelf and the cup, where a washed Bambu Geisha from Panama Los Lajones can sit beside the same Collingwood table service that began in 2009.
