Cafe 121

Head up Milton Road towards the Arbury end and you'll find Café 121 doing exactly what a local café should: making genuinely good coffee, feeding people well, and actually wanting regulars to come back. The sort of place where the staff know their espresso machine inside out and aren't precious about it—they'll make you a flat white that tastes like they actually care, not like they're performing. The food's straightforward and done properly: proper breakfasts, decent sandwiches, the kind of lunch that doesn't apologise for itself. It's the café that keeps the neighbourhood ticking over, filled with a proper mix of people actually living their lives rather than performing them on Instagram.