Coffee Quest #20: Auction Rooms (this rustic-chic cafe is pretty great!)
I really like North Melbourne.
Coming from surburbia, there's something about it that's half metropolitan, half walkable city, and still manages to retain a certain amount of greenery and its own unique rustic look (without being too grunge). Or maybe it's because my favourite place in Melbourne is also here.
Riiiight across the street is Auction Rooms, a cafe that comes highly recommended by all my friends. Big windows lets in a lot of natural light and the wooden furnishings provide a nice and welcoming mood despite its rustic warehouse interior. They also sell Mörk Chocolate cookies, pastries, and cakes in their cabinet (though it isn't displayed as such - you only realize that if you've been to Mörk).
Their coffee uses the St Ali (Colombia x Brazil) blend. St Ali seems to be the default for a lot of places I've gone to; it's fine, I'm not opposed to ordering it again.
But their food.
Yes.
Now I understand why.
This is their corned beef hash with slow cooked beef, shredded potato, cabbage, leek, poached eggs, spicy hollaindaise (very little spicy), pickled vegetables, and grilled pita bread.
This is VERY new to me and it works. The pickled vegetables mess and salad and corned beef was just excellent. It was tart and came with both crunch and crisp and there were so many different flavours all working in tandem. The hollandaise poached eggs were just the right amount of runniness. You basically got to pick and choose how you wanted to sample the dish, and with different ratios or mixes of sauce/hollaindaise/runny eggs, you introduced a drastic heterogeneity to every bite.
Every bite was interesting. Even the grilled pita slices on the side just worked.
I loved it. I was raving to my partner about how it's so different from your usual rendition of breakfast food. The chef decided to do their own thing and were unabashed about it. (I have heard many chefs and behind the scenes people just talk about food in such a horrible and biased way like "oh, we can't use corned beef, that's poor people's food". Man, what.)
Thank you.
Oh yeah, and the interior/exterior design! I mean, you can hang out here! In this weird janky half exterior half interior area! There's a tree in here!
What's up with that? Don't care, it's great!