Category: Café

Categories
Café

Roastville Coffee Roasters – Marrickville NSW Restaurant Review

I love a good all day food menu, and while I’ve been delving into the world of making espresso at home, it’s been a two in one action to try out cafes with their own beans to see if I manage to find something I really like for the home machine.

The Tasmanian salmon fish cakes ($22) featured two rounded fish cakes atop a bed of yuzu aioli and covered in herbed slaw and radish, with a side of poached egg. The slaw was crunchy and fresh, perfectly countering the friedness and unexpected potato-ness of the fish cakes and the creaminess of the mayonnaise bed. It was a tasty dish, kind of reminiscent of the salmon salad at A Man and His Monkey which I also enjoyed, but I wish I had been forewarned about the potato.

The green chilli scrambled eggs ($25 including extra halloumi) was solid, comfort stuff, with a huge serving of tasty eggs with green chilli, red banana chilli, cherry tomatoes and herbs on seeded sourdough. I rarely get scrambled eggs at cafes, but I actually quite enjoyed this. It was, like the salmon fish cakes, a creative dish that ventures outside of café staples.

The side of fried chicken ($5) served with spicy mayo was sadly not good in all the worst ways – damp on the outside, but dry on the inside. There are a couple of dishes on Roastville’s menu that centre around fried chicken, like their waffle dish, so unfortunately those don’t sound too promising either. No one kicks every goal.

Coffee was alright, but not phenomenal enough for me to dial in a new bag of beans.

COMMENTS: Despite being a commercial coffee roaster, Roastville’s cafe operation actually has quite a fun and interesting all day food menu, that matches the expectations set by Sydney’s top notch of cafes. I had a good meal. I’d definitely like to return for seasonal variations.

Roastville Coffee Roasters
157 Victoria Rd, Marrickville NSW 2204
(02) 9560 4802

Categories
Café

Black Seed Eatery – Parramatta NSW Restaurant Review

We ate at Black Seed following a set of nights.

I, along with most of our party, had the Ricotta and Chilli Jam Scrambled Eggs ($14.90), with crispy bacon, sliced avocado, and grilled sourdough bread. I enjoyed the fluffy scrambled eggs, and though to date no scrambled eggs have been able to hold a candle to the perfect eggs at Dopa, these came pretty close. The chilli jam and feta added spicy, salty, and creamy flavours to the egg, the bacon was well cooked and adequately portioned, and the advocado provided a good degree of freshness and balance. Overall this dish had a high degree of cohesiveness, and I can actively recommend this.

Black Seed Eatery
105 Phillip St, Parramatta NSW 2150
(02) 9635 0602

Categories
Asian Fusion Café Japanese

Bloc145 – Redfern NSW Restaurant Review

Some restaurants deserve a wholeheartedly lukewarm response, and in my opinion Block145, a cafe we drove half an hour to eat at, is one of them.

We were tempted by the Salmon Okonomiyaki ($20) and a desire to relive some good meals we had overseas. Unfortunately the gap between expectation and reality was quite large in this dish. While the grilled salmon was well cooked with a crispy skin, that was the first and last superlative of the meal. The okonomiyaki itself I found disappointing, with a high flour content. It was sadly not what I was looking for.

After a recent success at Cafe Mckenzie in Randwick we decided to go for yet another Toastie with truffle oil, honey, and parmesan ($14). Sadly this particular toastie was far less exciting than the benchmark set by its competitor, with no great feeling of substance to it. It was quite small, and I would have much rathered more toastie than a salad I didn’t ask for.

These crispy smashed potatoes ($10) continued our breakfasts’ trend of being completely unsatisfying. I don’t really see what made them crispy or smashed. They really were essentially regular roast potatoes with a sprinkling of salt.

Pictured above, a photo of a bloody mary that I did not have. My partner did.

THOUGHTS
I’m sad about my trip to Bloc145. Their menu has so many wonderful looking items I am left wondering if I simply chose the wrong things, or if my experience would have been like this regardless of what I chose. I wouldn’t go back.

Bloc145
145 Redfern St, Redfern NSW 2016
0403 655 661

Categories
Café Vietnamese

Coffee Embassy – Northmead NSW Cafe Review

The purpose of an embassy, if I understand correctly, its to put one’s best foot forward to foster communication and co-operation between parties. Unfortunately for coffee, its Northmead-based embassy does not quite cut the mustard.

Coffee Embassy’s chosen ambassador is their “famous” bacon and egg roll with housemade tomato relish ($8). Though proclaimed to be Northmead’s best on posters on the cafe’s structural poles, I found this bacon and egg roll to be very lacking. Though my first experience with this B&E in 2019 was actually quite positive, it all changed when I visited again in 2021. The 2021 iteration was overall quite a dry roll, with both the bread and bacon lacking any significant amount of moisture. The bacon was unusually hard, difficult to bite, chew, or enjoy. Though it’s Coffee Embassy’s signature dish, I though this roll was one of the worst I’ve ever had.

Moving on from the bacon and egg , we will now discuss this crispy pork banh mi ($8). Though I remember enjoying Coffee Embassy’s pork rolls when I first started eating there in 2019, I have, in recent times, grown accustomed to the excellent quality of crispy pork belly rolls at Hong Ha, Marrickville Pork Roll, and in the rest of the Eastern Suburbs. My most recent trips to Coffee Embassy have instead been met with grief. Coffee Embassy’s pork is drier, colder, and leaner than I had expected, a far cry from the standard crackling pork belly rolls you might get elsewhere. Furthermore, the promised crispiness was not locatable. Not great.

THOUGHTS
I don’t know if Coffee Embassy has become markedly worse over the last few years, or if my tastes have just evolved and become more refined. Either way I’m glad that though they are an embassy they are not representative of banh mi as a whole. If you’re already in Northmead, Xcel Roll’s Parramatta store is not that far away.

Coffee Embassy
33/1-3 Kleins Rd, Northmead NSW 2152
(02) 9613 3634

Categories
Café Italian Middle Eastern

Bar Biscotti – North Strathfield NSW Restaurant Review

The main take-home message from this review is really that the food was good, but we spent 40 minutes waiting.

This mango smoothie ($9) was $9 expensive, but pretty good, and came soon after ordering, which was more than we could say about the rest of our meal.

The Mediterranean Potato & Eggs ($21) featuring spiced (mostly vinegary) potato, egg, and zaatar was pretty good. The potatoes were a bit more sour than my partner would’ve liked, and though she wasn’t particularly keen on them I felt the eggs were quite good, as was the surprise zaatar which I think was just mentioned in the menu as “coriander… and a side of pita bread”.

The Italian Meatballs ($22) were pretty good. The Turkish bread was probably the best part – light and airy, a bit oily, a bit crispy, and nice and warm. The beef meatball was a bit weird, a brown exterior with an unexpectedly pink interior displaying a gobstopper like quality that the waiter PROMISED was normal and intentional (but why?) We did eat it and did not get sick. The Napoletana sauce was fine, and the rocket was plenty, but I do feel like a bit of extra bread to soak up all that extra sauce wouldn’t have gone astray. I don’t know why there’s a separate option on the menu for a meatball sub which seems essentially the same dish with different bread and cheese but vaguely the same deal. It was a difficult choice, but I think with this delicious Turkish bread we probably made the right one.

OTHER THOUGHTS We didn’t really complain about our meal taking an extremely long time to come, but the couple next to us who ordered after us and got their food fractionally before us did, and I think they were offered something free out of it. The food was reasonably good, but I’m just glad we had nowhere else to be that morning, because 40 minutes is too much.

Bar Biscotti
24 George St, North Strathfield NSW 2137
0424 195 732