The Milk Bottle is a classic breezy seaside café. Retro chairs that I haven't seen since Tilley's in Canberra and a coffee machine that opens onto the street so that the barristas can check out the surf.
Primarily a lunchtime burger joint, the breakfast menu was hadwritten on butchers paper and stuck in the window.
On my first visit I went for the Big Breakfast. Two fried eggs, bacon, a hash brown, grilled tomato and toast. There were no stand out items, like the bacon I had at Revolver, but every element was solid. Calories don't count when you've just run a marathon and it was fanatastic to be eating a guilt free fry up!
Rather than giving out table numbers, colour samples were used instead. I kinda liked it.
Having stuffed myself silly for the last 36hrs I decided that I better start eating vaguely sensibly so went for the Bonsoy Bircher. The bircher came served with a vivid red poached pear. The pear could have been a little softer for my taste. However, there were no complaints about the rest of the bircher. One of my favourite breakfast dishes, the bircher is an unsung hero you don't see often enough in my book.
Usually made with apple juice, I haven't had a soy milk museli before. It tasted good with a nice change in texture from the odd nut folded through the oats.
The other restaurants we tried in Lorne I thought were generally expensive and mediocre. The Milk Bottle had honest prices and freshly cooked food. That deserves praise.
This possibly sounds silly, but one thing I noticed and liked in Oz when I was there (nearly ten years ago now) was that cafes and restaurants were much more likely to have bespoke signage than the equivalents in the UK. In the UK we tend to expect a more polished professional "look" to places which tends to blandness and uniformity.
ReplyDeleteTo some extent the gastro-pubs have moved away from this but I like the idea of the menu being written up on butcher's paper each day to a pre-printed same-stuff-every-day thing.
Very true BE, you do get the impression that menus change a bit more regularly over here.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I didn't work into the post was that their menu was a huge A1 printed poster stuck to the front door with blue tack. There wasn't a table menu in sight. I liked that too.