Highroad has separate breakfast, lunch and dinner menus. Photos: Lucy Ridge.
Since Maheer Prasad and Lachlan Exton took over Highroad and installed chef Cho in the kitchen, there have been plenty of changes.
The team introduced dinner service last year, with a French bistro-inspired menu, and has now expanded those elevated offerings to a dedicated lunch menu. Previously, the daytime menu offered an all-day brunch – which is still common for most cafes – so I was excited about the opportunity to taste the restaurant-style dishes during daylight hours.
While no longer an official ONA venue, Highroad is still strongly focused on its specialty coffee and has branched out with a list of special drinks. While tempted by the banoffee thickshake (banana, coffee and ice cream), I settled on the lighter Hazelnut Orange Cold Brew. It arrived with the hazelnut foam topping floating through the coffee in tantalising wisps. I was told that the best way to enjoy it is to first take a sip of foam from the top before sipping through the straw. A twist of fresh orange zest on the surface offered a lovely aroma on top of the hazelnut foam.
The foam atop this cold brew drink was creamy and delicious.
While I enjoy the flavour of a cold brew, I often miss the mouthful of a milky coffee (I apologise for the wanky foodie language), so I appreciated that the creamy foam gave me that feeling without overpowering the subtleties of the coffee flavour. A top-notch drink!
A couple on a table nearby was enjoying an impressive Fish and Frites – a seafood alternative to the equally impressive Steak and Frites, which I’ve previously devoured for dinner and which looked very tempting. But to accompany my lighter choice of beverage, I ordered the calamari pasta salad (in the alternative reality where I had the banoffee thickshake, I would have leaned into the vibe and opted for the Nashville Fried Chicken Burger).
The salad arrived looking gorgeous with warm, charred purple squid and long slices of zucchini, topped with spoonfuls of ricotta. The base of the salad is risoni: rice-shaped pasta that cunningly disguised a generous scattering of pine nuts. The basil pesto was lovely, although I would have liked the risoni to come up to an ambient temperature from fridge-cold to allow the flavour to shine a little more (but that’s a minor quibble). Summery and fresh with complex flavours, this grown-up salad would be lovely with the Ravensworth The Grainery white wine or another local drop from the well-considered drinks list.
The calamari pasta salad is a classy and tasty lunch dish at Highroad.
The breakfast menu remains impressive and delicious: three options of eggs Benedict, Shokupan toast with za’atar, and French toast with fresh figs, thyme and honey.
It can be tricky for a cafe to expand into the restaurant space, and there’s often a risk that in trying to be all things for all people, a venue will end up half-assing too many things rather than focusing (to paraphrase Ron Swanson) on ”whole-assing one thing”. But Highroad isn’t half-assing anything, and has managed to maintain its specialty coffee-focused breakfast trade while classing up lunch and dinner in Dickson.
Highroad is at 1 Woolley Street, Dickson. Is it open from 7 am to 4 pm Monday to Wednesday, 7 am to 10 pm Thursday and Friday, 8 am to 10 pm on Saturday and 8 am to 4 pm on Sunday. Follow Highroad on Instagram.
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