It’s rare for me to pay so much attention to the fitout of a cafe or restaurant, but Halfday Deli’s grey and red colour scheme really got me going – looking more like something out of the inner city than a shop on the podium level of a Wollongong apartment building.
The food was good, though our first and second choices were sold out for the day.
The beef & dip ($20) was a sandwich on ciabatta with three key ingredients – roast beef, provolone, and horseradish dressing, and the alleged inclusion of pickled fennel, which was neither here nor there. The tanginess of the mustard dressing was strong and delicious mixed with the roast beef, which, though less pink than in the online marketing photos, was still adequately moist and tender.
I enjoyed every bite of this sandwich both with and without the chicken gravy dip, though my wife thought that the dip was necessary to add saltiness and temper down the strong tangy horseradish taste.
The sausage & egg ($18) with a pork and fennel sausage patty and a slab of egg was the lesser of the two sandwiches (in my opinion), with a relatively mild unexciting flavour and texture carried mostly by the yoghurt ranch and dill pickles. Not something I’d visit for, though the beef and dip definitely was. Seeing as the chicken cotoletta focaccia option was not available, the staff were gracious enough to make this one for us on focaccia rather than the ciabatta that it usually comes with.
We also chose to add a small giardiniera salad and two hashbrowns for $9.50, which was the right choice. My wife enjoyed the crispy pickled vegetables, especially the cauliflower, as well as the sweet roasted walnuts – to name just a couple of the salad’s components.
The dressing of yoghurt ranch was the same white fluid that carried the sausage and egg, and equally enjoyable drizzled on vegetables as it was in the sandwich.
The hash browns were decent – crispy on the outside, unusually soft on the inside, and definitely too salty to eat by themselves.
Overall Really quite a good sandwich, and a good salad, from an outlet with many more options I’d like to try. I’d be open to coming back both for breakfast/lunch and their pizza dinner.
UPDATE –
We returned for a bit of pizza. I didn’t feel the need to go out for dinner, for once in our lives, but my wife feared that we may never have dinner in Wollongong again, and that this would be her last chance.
We will describe both pizzas that we had as a class, first of all. Halfday makes their pizza in a gas oven, and they come out with a great crust which is oily, tasty, and somehow manages to be both light and chewy at the same time. The base is thin but with reasonable structural integrity, though with much blackened burnt bits on the base – room for improvement.
This is the sausage + cavolo nero + scarmoza ($26). The sausage on this pizza had a complex flavour, with spices and a strong fennel taste. I enjoyed the scarmoza, which my wife felt tasted like smoked salmon. One improvement that I could suggest for the toppings would have been more sauce – the tomato felt quite light and difficult to appreciate, especially in the more bare portions.
The capocollo + creme fraiche + fior di latte + cured egg yolk + pecorino ($29) was a maximally umami mixture of ingredients. The processed meat was not large in quantity but high in smoky flavour, and to be honest I felt better about there being not that much, as I’m still trying to live my best low-carcinogen life. The rest of the pizza was quite tasty, savoury, and fatty – a very luxurious representation of a tomato free pizza.
Take a look at this sweet box for takeaway.
Overall – pretty good!
Halfday Deli
Shop 1/38 Atchison St, Wollongong NSW 2500
