Category: Café

Categories
Café

Circa Espresso – Parramatta NSW Restaurant Review

We counted three visits to Circa Espresso in the 2018-19 period, with further visits in 2021 and more to come.

I’m not usually one to go for vegetarian dishes, but Circa’s Ottoman Eggs ($22) are in a league of their own. The eggs themselves are perfectly poached, served on a mattress of fried, crumbed eggplant, itself lying on a cloud of garlic labneh. The interplay of textures – the runny egg yolk, the crispy eggplant, the creamy labneh, and the housemade bread – is superb, as is the combination of tangy, spicy, and umami flavours. A really good dish that is a must-try.

The humpty doo saltwater barramundi en papillote ($26) was the most expensive thing on the menu, and also quite bad. The barramundi was very overcooked, with the skin soft and wilted rather than crispy. The salad of parsley and cucumber was hard and difficult to eat, and as such wasn’t really able to be eaten in conjunction with the fish. The flavours were overall mild and bland, and after the huge success of the Ottoman eggs these parcel baked fish bits were quite disappointing.

The wild ferment whole wheat pancake ($22) was a beautiful sweet dish. The thick but light wheat pancake was glazed in maple syrup, producing a hard, crispy skin and two separate textures per bite. The fresh, tangy peach provided a good foil to the sweet maple syrup glaze and the white chocolate creme fraiche, and the crunchy cocoa nibs and pistachios added a third texture to the meal. I don’t normally go for sweet dishes, but I could absolutely see myself ordering this again.

This lamb cutlet focaccia sandwich ($15) from the specials menu of Monday the 15th of March 2021 was really good. The meat was delicious, the bread was delicious, and the kaleslaw was fresh and crunchy.

An extra normal iced chocolate ($7). I could not stop my partner from ordering what was essentially chocolate milk with ice cubes.

Sujuk ($7) was served with a small amount of bread. Again quite expensive.

SPRING 2021

The dressed avocado ($18) is an interesting name for a dish where avocado is equal firsts in precedence with a number of other ingredients. The avocado headliner was in fact not more special than any other cut in half and pitted avocado, while its colleagues the cherry tomatoes were delightfully and unexpectedly bright and full of flavour. The avocado-cup of oil and aged balsamic vinegar and bed of soft white bean hummus added a depth of umami to balance the otherwise extreme freshness of this meal. A perfect low carb option, it’s just a shame that I had to ruin it with a deep fried eggplant.

The side of crumbed eggplant ($6?) was ordered as I wanted only the best part of the Ottoman Eggs while not committing to the full deal. Whilst the eggplant was as good as I remembered, it didn’t quite go with the freshness of the avocado dish, and having it alone really just highlighted how well the Ottoman Eggs works as a cohesive dish.

SUMMER 2022

Another year at the largest healthcare campus in the Southern Hemisphere, another year of post-nights breakfast at local legend Circa. Though I’ve never been a mad shakshuka fan, I decided to step out of my comfort zone for these baked eggs with beef sujuk ($26), spending Valentine’s day breakfast with my colleagues rather than my partner. Though I easily could’ve ordered the old, trustworthy Ottoman eggs, I was inspired by my junior colleague TJB to try something new. These baked eggs turned out to be extraordinary, with a richness of flavour not easily matched elsewhere. The roma tomatoes, harissa gravy, and chilli flakes really brought out a rare depth of flavour, and paired with the runny eggs and feta made for the perfect topping and dip for Circa’s top tier focaccia.

A further visit in a further month gave me the opportunity to try this zaatar chicken salad ($26), an extremely healthful bowl which was a mixture of quinoa, seed mix, sumac, broccolini, pickled radish, cabbage, and (cold temperature) smoked chicken over a bed of baba ganoush. Though the flavour wasn’t amazing compared to all of the other delicious foods featured above, it was obviously very healthy and there is a value to that too.

$5.50 for a cold brew coffee with a giant ice cube is too much.

WINTER 2022

Another season, another menu, and more foods to review. The cuttlefish & chorizo salad ($28) was the first thing I tried on Circa’s Winter 2022 menu, and if I’m being honest it was quite a disappointment. Many of the components of this warm salad were fantastic – the roasted greens, the sourdough crumb (great texturally), the chickpea and roasted garlic hummus, but the combination of these, together with the extremely salty cuttlefish and chorizo made a bowl that I could not finish. Though I am a big Circa Stan and like most of the things they put out, the saltiness of this particular salad just didn’t do it for me.

I didn’t drink this shrub ($7 or something) but I do love the crockery. My colleague CSPH enjoyed it. It did come with a shrub.

SPRING 2022

I spent 3 months away from Western Sydney working on the South Coast, but came back in time to enjoy this crispy confit duck ($27) on their Spring 2022 menu. I shamelessly tucked into this very lunchy breakfast whilst four of my five other colleagues had their reliably good Ottoman eggs. Their all-day menu is, after all, part of why we keep coming back time and time again. I loved the colour and the crispiness of the duck, with its skin and fat and tender meat. The vegetables and lentils were mild but still delicious, with quite a tangy taste from the red current jus. I can recommend this dish, and it was truly much better than the similar confit poultry at Melbourne’s Hardware Société.

Two fortnights in a row is too frequently to visit Circa, in my opinion, but it gave me the opportunity to give this crab fettucine ($28) a go. I had misremembered, while ordering this, the somewhat disappointing Squid Thai Pasta from Lil Miss Collins next door as a Circa creation, and was quite glad when this crab fettucine came that it was much different, and much better. The noodles, house made, were quite al dente but not overly so, with a strong sense of egginess. The chilli marinated crab wasn’t particularly plentiful, but present enough to not warrant a complaint, and the herbed sourdough crumbs did add a nice bit of texture to the meal. Though this wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever eaten at Circa, it was still on a good spectrum of nood. Sorry to the expert platers on Wentworth St for cropping out the large plate surrounding the reasonably sized food. One day I’ll have the Ottoman Eggs again.

WINTER 2025


I’ve eaten the Ottoman Eggs and Baked Eggs at Circa in alternating order at least six times a year since 2021. Not every visit where I eat one of their exemplary staples is worth an update to this post, but this time I had the beef cheek lasagnette ($29), a relatively new addition to their menu.

Being a non-Italian reading the word lasagnette, I had imagined some kind of a miniature lasagna which would have been perfect for a 9am breakfast. Though I did not voice my expectation, I felt like my semi-Italian friend PMR should have known what I was thinking and corrected me ahead of time. What I received and what fits the dictionary definition of the word lasagnette was actually a kind of broad pasta, thinner than but not extremely dissimilar from a pappardelle.

The dish was overall pretty tasty with a good size, good amount of beef, ragu, NOT too salty (I think my poor experience with the cuttlefish salad three years ago still gives me pause before ordering something new at Circa), and a nice bit of crunch from the sourdough crumbs. I’m a firm believer in real food for breakfast and once again Circa did not disappoint.

VERDICT
Eggs good. Many other things quite good. Some other things not good, quite expensive. My favourite café in Parramatta.

Circa Espresso
21 Wentworth St, Parramatta NSW 2150

Categories
Bakery Café

Bench Coffee Co – Melbourne VIC Restaurant Review

We actually visited Bench Coffee Co a few hours before we did their sister store Saint Dreux. Truly falling for the hype and packaging, we spent a great deal of money on some Korean-style dacquoise (their only food offering) and coffee.

The flavour options on offer are Raspberry, Black Sesame, Vanilla Sea Salt, Matcha, and Chocolate, each sandwiched between identical nutty biscuits ($7 each). We chose a box with one of everything, because I am stupid, but at least it meant that we got a nice presentation box to put in the recycling.

The dacquoise at Bench played like a cross between a macaroon and a macaron as imagined by me as a child when I didn’t know the difference. The pastry, identical between all flavours, was semi-sweet, airy and compressible with a strongly nutty almond-like quality. There was possibly too much pastry after the third dacquoise, and certainly by the fifth.

My favourite of the batch was the raspberry, which was fresh and light in comparison to for example the vanilla sea salt which I felt was too oily and buttery. One positive aspect of these desserts is that no flavour was too over-sweet, but this did unfortunately mean that the oiliness and butteriness was able to come more, and probably too much.

The coffee ($4.50 for a long black and $5.50 for a soy latte) was expensive but only normal in quality. I will however commend them on their bottomless complimentary sparkling water on tap, which they even let us fill our drink bottle with.

IN SUMMARY

If there’s one thing I can surmise from my experiences at LT Cardigan’s two Melbourne stores Saint Dreux and Bench Coffee Co it’s that they have an extremely strong social media presence that is very much in excess of their actual food quality. While their food is by no means bad, one would think that, based on how much hype surrounds them online, that their cafes were unmissable Meccas for anyone venturing North of the Yarra. Ultimately what I think is that their marketing guy should get a raise.

Get one dacquoise for curiosity, maybe another if you enjoyed the first. Not the whole lot.

BENCH COFFEE CO. Lt Collins
321 Little Collins St, Melbourne VIC 3000

Categories
Café Japanese

Saint Dreux – Melbourne VIC Restaurant Review

With an aesthetic and online cult following that echoes that of a sneaker brand, Saint Dreux’s premium-priced and premium-packed katsu sandwiches had a lot of hype to live up to.

It took us two attempts to eat the promised Saint Dreux katsu sandwich, the first of which was thwarted by a premature closure. We were not alone in our disappointment on this first trip, and shared a failed elevator trip and a lap around the St. Collins Lane centre with two other hungry adults.

This is a photo of the Saint Dreux box before being marred by oily fingerprints. Look at that subtle deep-black colouring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has the name in Japanese under it.

The wagyu katsu sando ($28) was something I had been planning to eat for months, and whilst it was good, I was ultimately somewhat disappointed. I enjoyed the mustard sauce that accompanied both the beef sando and the pork sando pictured below. The saucing ratio – that is, the ratio to sauce to filling to bread, was bordering on perfect, adding a nice flavour and moistness to each bite. The beef, while appropriately moist and tender and juicy, just didn’t live up to the lofty expectations that I had formed in my head through the battery of social media hype, packaging, and expensive asking price. It was a beef katsu sandwich. That’s all.

Though not the advertised promised land of this pilgrimage, I actually found the Pork Katsu Sando ($16) to be more perfect a sando than its beefy counterpart. The pork in this sandwich was juicy, flavourful and tender, equal to the best I’ve ever had. The mustard-like sauce again made a strong showing, providing a familiar tanginess and pungency without any of the secondary sweeter sauce used in most other Australian pork katsu sandos, for example from Sydney’s Kentaro.

THOUGHTS:
Though well presented and highly photogenic, I found the sandos at Saint Dreux to be merely good, but not life changing. I’d recommend a visit only if you’re in the area.

Saint Dreux
St Collins Lane Centre, Level 2, Shop 2, 08/260 Collins St, Melbourne VIC 3000
(03) 7016 8973

Categories
Asian Fusion Café Korean

CNR58 – Concord NSW Restaurant Review

Brunch that is slightly Asian is my favourite kind of brunch, and CNR58 brought the slightly Korean goods to the table this mother’s day just passed.

The Miso Salmon Eggs Benedict was a commination of things that I generally like, but don’t necessarily go together. This particular miso salmon was my third or fourth in recent times, and compared to its competitors in the Western Sydney sphere I found the salmon to be cooked well, but underflavoured. The miso on offer was really just a hint, and I feel that a stronger flavour could’ve added a lot, especially in view of the similarly low-taste pile of sliced cucumber. The eggs benedict side of the dish, on the other hand, were faultless. Arranged in two separate toast islands for the couple that loves to share, the eggs were poached to a runny perfection often sought but rarely seen. A dish half good half middling (does that make it three quarters good?)

The Chicken & Waffles was a very surprising dish. Having seen all the Korean staff manning the restaurant I had expected some combination of Korean fried chicken and waffle. What I got instead was chicken in more of a tempura batter than the classic Korean fried chicken batter, with a sweet maple-tabasco sauce that made the entire meal highly reminiscent of Chinese restaurant honey chicken. Apart from the unexpected sweetness of the dish the bacon was well cooked, and the waffle had a far nicer texture and flavour than my other most recent waffle experience at 3 Ronin.

I thought the Chicken Sausages were uninspiring.

VERDICT
We actually went to CNR58 in seek of their lunch menu, only to find out that it only starts at 11AM (nowhere online is this suggested to be the case). The dishes I had for breakfast were in the grand scheme of things only OK, but I would still go back to try their promising looking lunch and dinner offerings.

Categories
Café French

The Hardware Société – Melbourne VIC Restaurant Review

I managed to avoid eating at Hardware Société in my six years as a Melbourne local, but as fate would have it broke my streak on a recent visit back.

This Twice Baked Cheese Souffle ($23) didn’t really live up to expectations, though not more so than any other menu item that we had at Hardware Société. What I would consider the focal components of this dish – the cheese souffle and poached eggs – were actually quite good. I enjoyed the cheesy taste and the airy but somehow still creamy and dense (is this an oxymoron?) texture of the souffle, as well as the perfect runniness of the masterfully poached eggs. What didn’t quite appeal to me was the multigrain bread doused in an oil, pickled grapes, and nuts that my partner thought tasted a bit stale, and the salad whose limited freshness I felt was inadequate to counter this.

Some restaurants excel on taste and presentation but fail on their portion sizes. Hardware Société does more or less the opposite with their gigantic Confit Free Range Chicken ($26.50), with a truly larger than normal chicken maryland, pulled from some monster of a bird. Though I was in awe of the size of this chook, I was not so inspired by the actual flavour of the meat, which I found to be bland despite the better-than-usual texture of both the meat and the crispy skin covering it. The herby potato salad was much enjoyed as are most potato dishes by my partner, though I felt that there was a lot of room for some additional heat to be added to the system. The swirl of green tangy sauce was perhaps the only thing I truly enjoyed on this plate.

This hot chocolate ($7.50), served deconstructed in classic Melbourne fashion, was quite good, if a bit sweet. Note the addition of a miniature Easter egg, as if it were a little apology for the 15% public holiday surcharge across the menu.

The soy latte ($5.30) was truly quite small, expensive, and unspectacular.

THOUGHTS
I had quite a few good and special meals on my recent trip to Melbourne, but my trip to Hardware Société wasn’t one of them. It’s possible that we simply chose the wrong items on their menu, but I don’t think I’d give them a second chance to find out.

The Hardware Société
10 Katherine Pl, Melbourne VIC 3000
(03) 9621 2100