5 April 2025

The Russell Collins cafe/restaurant was in the basement of the T&G building in Collins Street, opening I think early 1940, and is a place I’d only ever heard about, but it was still going into the early 70s and plenty of people remember it fondly.

I think it was an affordable luxury, with women especially treating themselves, and sometimes their kids, with an experience that involved smart uniforms, good service and lots of flowers; the Australian Home Beautiful featured them particularly.

The T&G building was doubled in size by architects A&K Henderson in the late 30s, and this basement space was fitted out by August 1939, but I think opened a bit later – and it was so impressive it featured a spread in both Building Magazine and the Architects Journal. It could seat 350, was arranged mainly in booths, with sort of fake highlight windows, and lots of indirect coved lighting, which had the first use of tubular fluorescent lamps in Melbourne. The colour scheme was coral/pink and green (!), as seen in the architects sketches, posted on Facebook by a family member of a later management (the lower one is the companion Elizabeth Collins). There were two entrances, the main one off the marble-lined entrance, with its own lifts. Graeme Butler saved a couple of menus – ‘Epping Sausages’, and later ‘minimum charge 35c’, golly.

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