The Aussie Grind co-owner Lui Monforte said the café attracts a strong number of Australian and New Zealand customers.
It has a menu featuring Australian staples such as the flat white—an espresso-based coffee with steamed milk—and the chicken parmy, an Australian pub take on chicken parmesan served on a bed of fries rather than noodles.
In 2019, Monforte opened The Aussie Grind in Frisco with his wife Angie Monforte followed by a Flower Mound location in 2024.
On the menu
Prior to opening The Aussie Grind, the Monfortes owned and operated a cafe in Brisbane, Australia for eight years. Lui Montforte said when they opened The Aussie Grind, they incorporated the last menu they used in their Australia cafe.
“We still use Australia a lot for our inspiration for our menus, because we want to try and be as authentic to the Australian cafe scene as possible,” Lui Monforte said.
The eatery offers breakfast “breaky” and lunch everyday. Extended hours on Friday-Sunday feature a dinner menu.
A top-selling menu item is the Eggs Benny—eggs Benedict with applewood-smoked ham and house-made hollandaise sauce. Other crowd pleasers include the Avo Smash, an avocado toast served on sourdough with cherry tomatoes and pomegranate, and the breakfast pizza, featuring house-made pesto, roasted bell peppers, scrambled eggs and cheese.
What else?
In addition to a robust coffee program which uses coffee beans roasted at their Flower Mound location, The Aussie Grind also offers other drink options including fresh squeezed juices, smoothies, teas and cocktails also known as “grog.”
Brisbane ($8.95) features freshly squeezed orange, apple and pineapple juice. (Karen Chaney/Community Impact)
“In America, typically, if you go to a coffee shop, you’ll get coffee, maybe a few different pastries, that’s about it,” Lui Monforte said. “Whereas every cafe that you go to in Australia will have good coffee, fresh juices, smoothies and some kind of [food] menu offerings. It might be called a coffee shop, but you’ll expect to find these items. We needed to offer the juices and smoothies liquor to be authentic.”
The Backstory
The couple announced they were moving to Texas from Australia to start a cafe following research where the Monfortes discovered Frisco was one of the fastest growing cities in America. Lui Monforte’s mother was a bit sad and confused as to why such a move was necessary but after visiting a few times, she understands the appeal.
“The Australian Cafe scene is an extremely saturated market. We’d been over here a couple times on vacation and loved it—the lifestyle and the friendliness of Texas Southern hospitality,” Lui Monforte said. “It wasn’t until maybe my mom’s second or third visit that she said, ‘I get why you guys love it over here.’ I feel like America has a lot more freedoms than we have in Australia. We just love it over here—she get it now.”