Be Good Café

Be Good Cafe is a cafe and homewares shop combined at 261 Lower Heidelberg Road, in the East Ivanhoe Village strip. It opens 7am to 3pm weekdays and 8am to 3pm weekends, and the footpath seating out front is a fixture for local dog walkers, with the shop half a browse away for the homewares-inclined.

The dog setup

Dogs settle at the outdoor tables along Lower Heidelberg Road, on leash, and this is one of the few cafes in the area that keeps water bowls genuinely available rather than on request, reviewers call them out by name. Staff are welcoming and relaxed with dogs at tables. The footpath strip is tight-ish, so pick your moment outside the weekend coffee peak.

Worth knowing

The kitchen runs breakfast through lunch: toasties, BLATs, seasonal brunch plates and smoothies, with a rotating case of home-baked cakes and biscuits that does brisk trade. Hot chocolate and Prana Chai sit alongside the coffee, and the homewares shelves make the wait for a table more interesting than most. The topics that come up again and again from regulars are the cakes, the morning coffee run and the dog bowls.

Getting there and parking

The cafe anchors the East Ivanhoe Village shopping strip, with street parking directly out front and on the side streets behind. It is an easy walk for anyone in Ivanhoe East, and the Yarra River corridor is a short drive or a longer walk downhill.

Close by with the dogs

For a proper off-lead session, the Banyule Flats Reserve off-lead area on the Yarra flats at Viewbank has wide open fields and river-trail access. Back in the village, Ripples Cafe n Co sits a few doors down at 269 Lower Heidelberg Road as a second dog-friendly option on the same strip.

Pepsi: grab the window table with a cake and let the dog watch the village go by, the footpath here is made for it.

More stops around the suburb sit in the Ivanhoe East guide.