Run by a chef with serious cooking credentials, Vic Park’s Social Manna is an
endorsement for slow, steady and substance over (just) style.
Cafe$
Now that our relationship with avocado toast is less Beatlemania frenzy and more healthy adult, perhaps it’s time to turn our attention to other Australian cafe favourites and piece together their origin stories.
Take, for instance, chilli scrambled eggs. Who served it first? Is it an Australian invention? Is it best made with chilli oil, fresh chilli or something else? So many questions. So many sourdough breadcrumb trails to follow.
Locally, one such trail leads to Forklore, City West’s Asian-influenced cafe, and its XO scrambled eggs, an opening menu dish that was retired in 2023. Today, these eggs live on at Social Manna, a colourful Victoria Park cafe at the quieter car yard end of Albany Highway. It’s a glorious plateful, the eggs coaxed into glossy curds and doused in Hong Kong’s most famous 1980s condiment, sliced chillis and spring onions. This homage, I hasten to add, has the blessing of team Forklore, not least because Forklore co-owner Han Li Khor used to come here just for the regular scrambled eggs. Then again, Social Manna owner Sandro Puca is a chef with pedigree so, as you’d expect from someone that’s cooked at revered Perth kitchens such as Star Anise, Balthazar and Il Lido, Puca is details-oriented yet creative.
The fried kakiage (shaved vegetable fritter) anchoring his Japanese avo smash remake is crunchy and golden; the pickles are bright with ginger and the guacamole spiked with edamame is dense. Great Turkish eggs are the inverse of the ubiquitous shakshuka and star poached eggs nestled in a bed of garlicky yoghurt and muhammara. That juicy lamb patty? Unexpected but very welcome.
While Puca came up through some key P-Town restaurants, most know him as the former head chef for pastry maven, Rochelle Adonis. So when the conversation turns to baked goods, expectations are, understandably, high. But rather than embrace the conspicuous, more-more-more excesses of dessert bars or the Nordic and Japanese minimalism of craft bakeries, Puca and head chef Ashley Jimenez Varon have chosen to use assured technique to help the commonplace taste uncommonly good.
Does raspberry chocolate cake sound mundane? Not when you use an intensely fruity raspberry and white chocolate jam to sandwich discs of dense cake from a yet-to-be-named weight division between sponge and pound cake. Deeply chocolatey brownies straddle the line between liquid and solid. Made with doughs from Empire Pastry in Darlington, the savouries are prepared with similar care. Buff Cornish pasties are weighty in both the hand and mouth. There’s heft to the sausage rolls – torpedoes of minced pork and beef with the succulence of great meatballs, encased in sheaths of puff pastry baked to a toothsome crispness. While the shortcrust shell of my pie was a little underdone, I had zero qualms with its payload – a gutsy braise of lamb and potato that you would have turned heads on any Mediterranean dining table.
Again, this isn’t needy, attention-seeking food designed to trigger Pavlovian reactions to lunge for smartphones, but dishes guests can eat regularly and with confidence that all the little things are done right. It’s more quiet awe than shock. I’m not sure, though, I’d say the same about some of the props used to colour the space. The Book of Small Dick Energy is typical of the saucy reading material on the tables. The inscriptions in some of these books include words that most office HR departments would frown upon. An A-frame sign features Audrey Hepburn elegantly flipping the bird at passers-by.
Yet for every decor choice that raises an eyebrow, there’s one that warms the heart. A heroic quantity of vintage teaspoons donated by regulars adorn the walls, as do crucifixes, eye of Sophia talismans, Islamic calligraphy and other religious iconography, proof of Social Manna’s inclusive, diverse outlook. (See also the trans flags that hung in the windows throughout November to celebrate Victoria Park’s PrideFEST.) Photos of Puca’s late parents quietly, and I suspect proudly, watch over what their son has slowly built.
Albany Highway, as anyone who’s walked the strip on a Friday or Saturday night
knows, pumps and has a strong claim to being Perth’s premier food precinct. But at the risk of sounding (again) like an old man shouting at clouds, the noise grows ever louder. The neon glows a little brighter. Newcomers clamour for our attention, in person and in social media feeds.
Meanwhile, personal and personable places such as Social Manna continue to run their own race, slowly and steadily winning over and nourishing their communities. Long may it and its ilk prosper. And long may eaters – and us in the food media arena – recognise their importance.
The low-down
Atmosphere: a neighbourhood cafe that nourishes the people around it
Go-to dishes: pork sausage roll, XO sauce chilli scram
Drinks: all the coffees (Pound) and teas (High-Tea with Harriet) alongside house-made sodas and juices
Cost: about $55 for two people
Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.
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Max Veenhuyzen is a journalist and photographer who has been writing about food, drink and travel for national and international publications for more than 20 years. He reviews restaurants for the Good Food Guide.
