Sadly between our visit in June and this post getting written, it seems Gujju's has permanently closed. 20+ years still a very impressive innings.
June 13, 2026
Unfortunately, since we visited in June it seems as though Gujju's has closed down. It was a real gem, offering something different and this visit had me excited to go back and try more of the menu. Alas. This post is now just a record of how they were travelling in 2026.
Our Cheap Eats 2006/2026 project has us acting like we did when we first moved to Melbourne, heading out to far-flung suburbs to visit restaurants instead of just wandering around a narrow Brunswick/Northcote radius. This week it was time to revisit Gujju's Cafe and Chaat House in Malvern. We first visited back in 2008, and Cindy revisited a few years later - both visits were huge successes, with the Gujarati menu offering something pretty different to the standard suburban Indian restaurant we were most familiar with. We invited friend-of-the-blog Hayley to join us and see how things looked a few years down the road.
More than a decade since our last visit, Gujju's seemed to be still going strong, offering an impressive range of chaat dishes, a few Indo-Chinese dishes and the thalis that won me over so completely 18 years ago. The vibes are pretty basic - paper tablecloths and slightly harsh lighting - but we were there for food not vibes.
Cindy and Hayley split some chaat plates and left me to my thali. They started with a serve of Mumbai sev puri ($12.90), a spicy mix of chutneys, yoghurt, veggies and tiny little crispy noodles.
They added in a gobi manchurian ($15.90) from the Indo-Chinese menu as well. This is a plate of crispy cauliflower just bursting with flavours - chilli, ginger, green onions and soy sauce combine to make the cauliflower florets basically irresistable.
The final dish was a Hyderabadi tikki chaat ($12.90), a base of deep-fried potato, topped with yoghurt and chutneys and little chickpea flour balls (boondi). The flavour of this wasn't wildly different to the first dish, with the yoghurt and tangy chutneys doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but there was some fun textural variation. The chaats were $8-10 when Cindy visited in 2013, so prices have stayed pretty reasonable given the inflation of the past decade.
I had the Gujarati thali ($21.90), which comes with rice, roti, a dal soup and another beany dish (kathol), a veggie curry (undhiyu), a potato-y curry, some sort of cabbage pickle, a chilli pickle, a glass of buttermilk and a slightly disturbing looking pink dessert.
The prices have gone up since 2008, but only by $5, and the range of quantity of food is still very, very impressive. None of the curries were especially spicy, but they all had their own flavours and textures and it was a lot of fun to sample them all with my breads and rice. The dessert wasn't as sickly sweet as it looked, more yoghurty than creamy, but it wasn't really a huge highlight.
Gujju's was a pretty functional experience, the staff were efficient and the fit-out was pretty simple, but the menu was fantastic: all vegetarian, all delicious and with lots of stuff you won't get at your local Indian. It was definitely worth the trip! Fantastic that an unassuming place like this thrives for more than 20 years.
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Read about our earlier visits to Gujju's here and here. Since we last visited, Gujju's received a rave review on UrbanDuniya.
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Gujju's Cafe & Chaat House
1/141 Waverley Road, Malvern East
1/141 Waverley Road, Malvern East
9571 1188
Accessibility: Gujju's had several steps down from the entry to most of the seating. Tables and backed chairs were regular height and spaced densely throughout the restaurant. We ordered at our table and paid at a high counter. We didn't visit the toilets.
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