Eating Melbourne

Pearl Oyster is a cafe in either Preston, Thornbury or Northcote – depending on whether you ask the White Pages, Urbanspoon or Threethousand.com.au. Wherever it is, it’s one of the recent breed of suburban hipster Nanna’s-kitchen-chic brunch-crowd cafes that are sprouting up all over the northern suburbs – think along the lines of Mixed Business, Red Door Cafe, APTE and Palomino.

We decided to venture there for brunch at about 10.30am on Saturday. Pearl Oyster is a fair bit larger than the others mentioned above, but even so we still had to wait a few minutes to get a seat, and the first available were at the bar that overlooks the kitchen. It was pretty noisy over the clanging pans and hissing coffee machine, but hey, at least it’s a seat.

The waiter brought us menus and two water glasses right away (although no water), and took our coffee orders – they use Coffee Supremo’s organic Fair Trade coffee, FYI. We were sitting right in front of the cakes, which looked very tasty:

The menus are very cute, presented inside old school textbooks:

… however we both were tempted by the specials board – I ordered the special French toast, and J. ordered the “Upper East Side”.

And then we waited. And waited.

Our coffees took 21 minutes to arrive. (I know this from the time stamp on my camera.) I don’t know what you’re like in the mornings, but I get pretty antsy and cranky if I haven’t yet eaten anything or had any caffeine. After 21 minutes sitting there hungry and waiting and looking over a noisy kitchen and watching everybody else’s food go out, I was about to turn into the Incredible Hulk. I don’t mind a bit of a wait for food so long as I can at least get a coffee.

The tiny kitchen and 2-group coffee machine were flat out, so it’s not like the wait was due to slacking off. I think the problem is simply that their kitchen and coffee capacities are not enough to serve the number of seats adequately. Of course, cafe owners don’t want to have to turn punters away, so it would seem that the more seating the better… but unless they have the capacity to serve all those seats, they’re not actually doing more covers, they’re just making them all wait longer.

Anyway, the food also eventually arrived (33 minutes after ordering). Fortunately it was worth the wait. My French toast was made from thick sliced brioche and came with mandarin curd, stewed raspberries, thick cream and pistachios:

The curd was lovely and tangy and so were the raspberries – it was pretty intense and very sweet but I really liked it. Sugar buzz!!

J.’s Upper East Side was sourdough rye toast, spread with cream cheese and layered with smoked salmon, dill and caperberries, with lemon on the side:

Again, really good. Very high quality ingredients and a nice simple dish.

Overall, Pearl Oyster had really good food and pretty good coffee; but I couldn’t recommend it for a weekend brunch, unless you have more patience than I do. I’d definitely return, but on a weekday when it’s not so busy.