Today I had Breakfast at Cafe In The House, which is the eatery in Old Parliament House. I was with a group of about 10.
I’ve eaten there before, and always been underwhelmed, and today was no exception.
One standout though was the young lady who was serving, she was excellent: competant and helpful.
Unfortunately we had a young man who while pleasant enough, did not manage to take everyone’s order and did not seem all that motivated to be there. The young chap who was evidently the maitre ‘d showed promise and in time should be very good.
It’s a pleasant venue, indoors and out. It was quite busy this morning, and as lunchtime began and we left, people were flooding in. The service is reasonably attentive, too.
The food! Well, the breakfast menu is fairly brief. There’s the two poached egg classics, Benedict and Florentine. There’s a sweet pancake thing, and a sweet french toast thing. The people who had these pronounced them OK, although there were no huge raves. One lady ordered The Muffin Of The Day and some tea, none of which arrived until she re-ordered them. She was underwhelmed with the Muffin Of The Day, sitting all by itself on the plate… not very appetising for breakfast.
I and some others opted for the “Big Breakfast”. Now, at $17 you’d be expecting a pretty opulent breakfast with coffee. Not with this one. In fact, I suspect that it’s made by someone who really isn’t into breakfast. And coffee wasn’t included, you had to order that separately.
I’ve had big breakfasts, the one at Wilfreds in the National Parks building at Jindabyne is still the stand-out, but essentially when you order something like this, you expect a big tasty wholesome breakky, with buttered toast and nice things.
This was somewhat meagre and grudging. Two small slices of alleged sourdough hid underneath. Some quite nice fried mushrooms but they were really more like lunch mushrooms than breakfast mushrooms. Somewhat austere for breakfast mushrooms. 2 bits of cooked roma tomato, a pile of dryish house baked beans, some unremarkable bacon, and a heated up hash brown much like the ones you buy frozen (it wasn’t house-made, it was moulded).
However, what really irked me was the eggs! I am doomed to have liquid fried eggs whenever I go out for breakfast, it seems. Steaks should be rare: eggs should only be wobbly and liquid if you ask for them to be so. There’s some creeping egg-snobbery in this town which seems to dictate that fried eggs should wobble on the plate and burst all over the place and gush liquid yellow in all directions when punctured. This happened at the inaugural Riotact breakfast, and I was careful to ask for my eggs to be cooked fully, please. Nope.
It’s a bit much when the poached egg people have solid eggs and the fried egg people have liquid eggs.
Anyway. It was an underwhelming breakfast. The coffee was OK, not bitter, not weak, just somewhere in the middle. I had two!
It’s nice how they have papers and magazines lying around for people to look at, that really is a good touch at breakfast.
The venue itself was nice, but once again the food was ordinary and quite overpriced for what it is.
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