Chilli Crab Omelette with Brewed Coffee at Mecca Alexandria
The baristas at Mecca deserve to be rebadged as coffee connoisseurs, having mastered the art of a great brew. The Darkhorse blend is a must-try for bean fiends—it's roasted and brewed on-site and has notes of chocolate, peach and wine.
The stunning breakfast and lunch lineup includes a chilli scramble on Brickfields Bakery sourdough with a nori crunch and black sesame crisp, and a to-die-for BAE roll built with bacon, American cheddar, fried egg, hashbrown and chilli garlic aioli between milk buns.
Why we love it: The spacious and rustic interior provides the perfect backdrop for a weekend catch-up or a coffee-fuelled work session.
The battle's on between Sydney cafes out-industro-ing each other. The more car-yardy the better. Surrounded by abandoned factory machinery and busted up neon signs? Perfection.
So Mecca has opened in Alexandria smack bang in the middle of a bunch of car shops and the Mitchell Road Auction House (go for the coffee, stay for the rocket lamps). That means you get this interesting mingle of smells - there's the tantalising promise of bargains, petrol fumes and coffee thanks to the roastery out the back where Cam Stephens (ex-Wedge Espresso) is cooking up beans and making them toasty.
Up the front in the old factory warehouse, chevron floor tiles, large communal wooden tables with hairpin legs and about a thousand succulents tick all the "yup, I'm in a Sydney cafe circa 2015" boxes, in the best possible way
As do the snacks. Ben Abiad and Adriana Ortato are behind the menu here. The pair did time at Brickfields, Love Tilly Devine and Cornersmith and it's reflected in the menu. Check that brisket sandwich with anchovy mayonnaise on a Brickfields bun, embedded with caraway seeds. It's not quite as delicious as the OG at Brickfields, admittedly (the slow cooked beef is a little woolly) but the idea is sound.
This is big lunch stuff. Juicy roast pork and big ribs of crisp crackling, lentils, broken up with a sort of light sauerkraut mixed with thin slices of apple. And depending which side of the scales you're tipping, you could either go for a healthful soup of "bone broth" (gah - I will never stop being irritated by this), sprouts, pickles, kale, parsley, fresh cheese, raw shaved fennel, enriched with a poached egg. Or go full tilt boogie with the Korean-esque fried chicken burger on a soft bun with kimchi and mayonnaise. Phwoar.
Heart still beating? The caramel tart with chocolate ganache with a dusty powdered chocolate top is a sweet post-lunch punch in the kisser.
As you'd expect from Mecca owner Paul Geshos and company (the other Mecca cafes in the CBD and Ultimo pump out some of the best coffee in the city), the beverages here are exceptional, from your regular garden variety flat whites to their "feature coffees" ("We source and roast coffees that are clear expressions of their terroir"). There's also a keffir spritz: a fermented probiotic fizzing soda thing with orange and date. It's a bit like really fizzy, bitter Orangina.
Their booze licence is on the way, too. Imagine all the drunken antiques purchases to be made after lunch. Who says you don't need another 100-year-old lathe?
THE LOWDOWN
Pro tip Check out the desserts on the counter. And order a cookie as big as your face.
Try this There are only a few weeks of cool weather left - order the roast pork with lentils and pickles while you can.
Pro tip Check out the desserts on the counter. And order a cookie as big as your face.
Try this There are only a few weeks of cool weather left - order the roast pork with lentils and pickles while you can.
Mariana Teixeira de Carvalho has placed her grandfather’s world-class collection at the heart of a brand new museum
A terracotta-hued villa in labyrinthine gardens sweeps into view as the gates to the Albuquerque Foundation open – a postcard view one might expect of a quinta in Sintra, the Portuguese town close to Lisbon noted for its romantic architecture. The monolithic glass box wedged into landscaping beside it, however, goes wildly off-script – its undulating roof soars over the building like a sunhat, almost touching the shoulder of its sun-worn neighbour, which dates back to the 1700s. The duality is striking: past and present facing the future side by side.
This visual dichotomy takes on new meaning when Mariana Teixeira de Carvalho appears, hand outstretched by way of greeting. The 45-year-old raven-haired Brazilian, a former human rights lawyer, stayed here as a child – her grandfather Renato de Albuquerque, a civil engineer and entrepreneur, bought the estate as a family holiday home in the ’80s. Today, the two have spearheaded its transformation into an arts destinationdedicated to ceramics. It opens this month, with an inaugural show by Theaster Gates.
Ceramics have everything to do with community,” she says of the motivation for the project. “They are produced for the most convivial moments in life, for shared moments. This house has given us so much joy. Now we can share it with others.”
Teixeira de Carvalho lives and breathes art. The sculptural heels of her Dries Van Noten pumps and the splashes of colour on her coat hint at a calling that she’s pursued since 2009, leading her to work as a director at a number of prominent galleries, including Hauser & Wirth. She lives in London with her seven-year-old daughter, Alba, whom she shares with her ex-husband, U2 bass guitarist Adam Clayton, but as the co-founder of the foundation and chair of the board she will be travelling between countries. She chats with easy candour as we take a tour of the grounds, pausing briefly to watch a gardener shuffle between lavender flowerbeds, as the sound of hammering rings out from the surrounding buildings – a flurry of final preparations.
It’s been a long haul since construction got underway in 2021. The concept began with the idea of creating a permanent home for Renato’s collection of Chinese ceramics – a 60-year labour of love that has culminated in the world’s most significant collection of Ming and Qing dynasties export porcelain in private hands. It consists of more than 2,600 pieces, some of which have been loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and London’s V&A, and includes rare examples of First Orders – the earliest commissions of Chinese porcelain by the Portuguese featuring European iconography.
The project “costing several million” includes a purpose-built subterranean gallery concealed beneath the glass-box reception, envisaged by Brazilian studio Bernardes Arquitetura, which will showcase up to 20 per cent of the hitherto rarely seen works, with the remainder on rotation. “We will have different shows relating to different aspects of the collection, and tell the many stories attached to it, so people will always have something new to see,” says Teixeira de Carvalho. “But we’ll also probe the more difficult questions raised by it: it represents a period in a history of trade between two empires, one with the skills and resources to make porcelain, which fascinated Europeans, the other seafarers who mapped the world but also colonised many parts of it.”
Another part of the narrative is how her 97-year-old grandfather came by the artefacts. “He’s so charismatic, a true storyteller with so many anecdotes,” says Teixeira de Carvalho as we descend a spiral staircase into the wood-lined gallery. Warm, serene and punctured by foliage-filled windows, the space is the opposite of a white cube. “I love his story about how he came across a pair of 18th-century eagles,” she continues. “He searched for 40 years to find them and bring them back together!”
Renato, who lives in Brazil, initially had to be “strongarmed” to take part in Teixeira de Carvalho’s grand scheme, fearful it would be seen as an ego project. “It was always a private passion, something he did for himself, and for years no one knew who owned the collection. It was only when the Met organised a show in 2016 but could not proceed with an anonymous owner that he agreed to be named. Before then, it was simply known as the RA collection.”
We peer through treasure-filled glass cases that stretch through the mid-section of the building. “Oh, there’s the crab,” Teixeira de Carvalho says excitedly, spotting a crustacean-shaped tureen produced c1770 during the Qing dynasty. There are only two other such examples in the world. “And these plates,” she says, pulling open a drawer. “They feature the coats of arms of various European families. The collection is so diverse – some pieces are super-traditional, others quirky – but what strikes you most is how these delicate objects have survived over decades. The oldest piece in the collection, made of some kind of terracotta, is from the 20th century BC. To finally have everything together in Portugal, where many of the pieces were first commissioned, it’s like a homecoming.”
Teixeira de Carvalho sneaks us into a temperature-controlled unit that is typically out of bounds: a trove filled with objets of all kinds. In one corner is a giant wooden horse brazenly baring its teeth and, in another, a Japanese Namban saddle. But she heads straight to a drawer filled with her favourite pieces. “Look,” she says almost whispering as she holds a hand mirror up to the light, the frame and handle painted with delicate flowers. “Oh, and this is exquisite,” she says, carefully returning the mirror before lifting the tiny lid of an ornate inkwell next to it. “Can you believe, its glass container is still intact.”
Teixeira de Carvalho has inherited her grandfather’s collecting genes, even taking a course at the V&A in Chinese ceramics with a view to helping to safeguard the collection. But her own interests are also reflected at the foundation, which will show both modern and traditional work. “I live in the contemporary world,” she says, as we leave the gallery and head to another new building at the far end of the gardens. Here, a changing roster of shows will spotlight emerging and established ceramic artists. “This entire region is attracting a much more international crowd, and this is what most of them will want to see.”
Kickstarting the contemporary programme with Gates is a statement of intent – as is the foundation team’s line-up, which includes Italian-born art critic and curator Jacopo Crivelli Visconti. “Theaster was already working on his Afro-Mingei exhibition for the Mori Art Museum in Japan – part of what we will show here is coming from there,” Visconti says. “It’s a ceramic floor made from black clay where Gates will install a series of his own sculptures and a selection of pieces he personally chose from the Albuquerque Collection. The layered histories that each of those objects carry will meet and clash. It’s about a mingling of cultures, which is all very present in his work in general.”
He gleefully recounts the story of how Gates fooled the world with a fictional Japanese ceramicist called Shoji Yamaguchi, a figure supposedly married to a Black civil-rights activist, who he invented to spark conversations about the marginalisation of certain ethnic groups and artistic mediums. The ruse was only revealed when Gates turned up at the opening of Yamaguchi’s real-life exhibition and announced it was his work at the end of the evening. “He’s a very contemporary and extremely urgent artist,” says Visconti. “We want people to visit the permanent collection and then come down here and make the connection.”
“Plus, Gates began with ceramics,” Teixeira de Carvalho chimes in, “and he’s acutely preoccupied with community-based projects.” She recalls being influenced by the work of Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino at Documenta 13 in 2012; she had filled a former gardener’s home with abstract, unfired clay pieces. “I guess that unconsciously sparked the idea of doing something with this house, but I was also struck by the juxtaposition of ceramics as both high art and domestic objects. There is a duality to the medium, but also a familiarity that most can relate to. People can be intimidated by huge canvases, but there’s an ancestral memory in ceramics.”
We enter the old villa where she and her sister shared a bedroom when returning from their studies in Brazil; generations of her family gathered for celebrations here, around a long table in what was the dining area. “My bedroom was all pink,” she says, “and my mother’s yellow and red. Both have now become part of a residency where we’ve created space for three residents.”
Downstairs, the store is set to be a go-to for Portuguese artists such as Beatriz Horta Correia, Vania R Goncalvesand design practice Ther, while the hope is that the bar and restaurant will draw families wanting to stay for the day. But despite the excitement at the new, nostalgia creeps in when we enter the old chapel adorned with Portuguese azulejo tiles beneath a frescoed ceiling. Untouched by the renovations, it will be a quiet space to sit and watch presentations about the project. “We’ve been careful to embrace the past and bring it with us,” Teixeira de Carvalho says. “The old anchors the new, one is not better than the other.”
I ask how it feels to hand over the home. “I had mixed feelings when we closed down the house. All my grandmother’s things were here, and I came with my grandfather and my daughter, and we were dealing with the possibility of losing my grandmother [she died in January 2023] and the loss of this place; but at the same time, we were together and we knew we were going to turn this into something amazing. That was a rite of passage,” she says looking around the villa. “The moment this stopped being a family home and became something bigger than us.”
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