Find yourself in one of Canberra’s many sprawling, leafy suburbs on a Saturday morning and you’ll quickly learn that this, at its heart, is a café town. Every pocket of the nation’s capital heralds the weekend’s arrival with a chorus of grunting espresso machines, drawing queues of eager Canberrans desperate to get their hands on a freshly baked loaf of bread or a plate of poached eggs. (Pictured: Barrio Collective Coffee, Braddon.)

Already celebrated for their signature beans, which you’ll find fuelling espresso machines all over Canberra, the team behind Canberra’s largest specialty roaster (ONA) grind and brew their fine work at this brunchy caffeine mecca. Named for the ‘cupping’ process used to blindly judge the quality of coffee beans in competition, The Cupping Room pairs your award-winning flat white with a tidy menu of suitably elevated brunch classics; blood orange-cured salmon with compressed melon and beetroot gel, kombu confit mushrooms, guacamole-spiked bacon and egg roll and their travel-worthy hedonistic French toast: egg-soaked slices of focaccia, grilled until golden, served with chocolate soil, mango gel and, yep, orange cheesecake frosting. Photograph: Visit Canberra

Despite Australia’s diverse love of a wide range of cuisines, our brunch offerings have remained trapped in largely the same repetitive granola-and-eggs-on-toast groove. Rye puts a refreshingly Scandinavian spin on things, not only reinterpreting the classics (poached eggs with kipfler potatoes and beetroot skyr, for example), but also introduces Canberra to some new soon-to-be-favourites. If the Skagenöra, with its crème fraiche-dressed prawns, dill and caviar on rye bread, doesn’t tempt you, the Rye breakfast board (gravlax, soft-boiled egg, cheese, prosciutto, grilled pear, red currant jam and selection of breads) lets you start your day by diving into a personal charcuterie platter.

Tucked into Melbournesque Braddon, Barrio Collective Coffee take their brews appropriately earnestly, prepping the beans in a 1950s German roaster and grinding them to order. Food’s a serious matter too, with an emphasis on seasonality (an odd rarity on the brunch front) manifested in beautiful plates dotted with pickled bits and pieces. And since we’re in Canberra, who do we petition to get an Order of Australia medal for whoever came up with the milk bun stuffed with egg, cheese and – get this – a patty of bacon hash? True Aussie genius.

Ask a group of locals for their pick of the best brunch in town and it won’t be long until someone shoves you toward Penny University. Maybe it’s the playful menu, pitting bircher muesli against a veggie-packed okonomiyaki, and a local pork hash against a blood sugar-spiking peanut butter and choc chip crepe with vanilla ice cream (if you eat it in the morning it qualifies as breakfast, right…?). Or maybe it’s the house blend coffees, served with a double-shot as standard. Most likely, though, it’s the list of brunch cocktails, including a fiery bloody mary, shot-in-the-arm espresso martini or a mimosa spiked with booze from a local distillery. Photograph: Visit Canberra

This grey-walled, industrial-chic café in Campbell’s main drag might seem a tad cold at first glance, but it’s a fitting backdrop for the serious heat coming out of the kitchen. Whether it’s jaffles packed with mapu tofu or kimchi, prawn toast with a zingy yuzu mayo or a roll stuffed with egg, Swiss cheese, kewpie mayo and chashu bacon, the pan-Asian fireworks in your mouth are the perfect kick off for a big weekend. Coffee is sourced both from ACT’s Barrio and Sydney’s Edition Roasters, and nothing go to waste; leftover milk is turned into cheese, food scraps go to a chicken farm, and coffee grounds are donated to local schools to use as compost. Related story: Best bars in Canberra for Friday night drinks