These days, the well off in Canberra are a well fed bunch indeed. Culinary standards have come a long way, baby. I was hoping that we could sample some good grub this morning at Verve, which is always a favourite of mine, but there were 10 of us for breakfast, we drank too much the night before and thus we were out of bed way too late to score a table.
A quick walk up the sidewalk showed that all the other good cafes were full. There was one though that had no one sitting in it at all, and we took that as a sign to avoid it like the plague. The only choice was to duck into an arcade and sample the cafes on the other side of the Manuka shopping centre.
This place met the key requirements - it had seating for 10, outdoor heaters and there were people sitting around eating and drinking. The menu also looked pretty good. I set quite a bit of store by the menus that a place puts out. If they have taken some care with the menu, then maybe they will take a bit of care with the food.
Well, in this case, we were fooled by the high standard of menu presentation. We ordered coffee - lots of coffee, and in many different varieties (flat white, flat white in a mug, capuccino, latte, long black - the whole nine yards of coffee), and all reported the same thing. It came out cool and watery. I am not a fan of coffee made with superheated steam that scalds the lips on contact, and I am a big fan of iced coffee, but I am not a fan of luke warm coffee. Coffee should be served at one end of the temperature spectrum or the other.
With a normal coffee, you couldn't stick your finger into it without wanting to rapidly pull it out before it starts to blister. With the Zucchero coffee, I reckon I could have pulled out my old fella and plonked him in my latte and I would have been none the worse for wear. Except that it was about 8 degrees outside, and my knob would have frozen once I pulled it out.
The coffee was also as weak as it was luke warm. I don't know who they had driving the coffee machine that morning, but either they had no idea how to drive it, or they were skimping on the steam and coffee beans. Coffee flavoured milk would be the best way to describe my latte. Most of us had to order a second cup in order to meet our morning caffeine quota. I broke my normal one cup a day rule and had a macchiato after my latte. I figured that if I could stop them from putting more than some milk froth into it, it might almost taste like a coffee. The macchiato was not bad, but it was not good enough to stop me dissing their general standard of coffee making. Look at it - you can almost see through it. Normally, if I drink two cups of coffee in a row, I get the shakes like someone with Parkinsons. Two cups of Zucchero coffee didn't even generate a twitch.
Breakfast was not much better. I was Starvin' Marvin by the time we sat down, but I didn't feel like a full breakfast (something to do with all the bottles of red consumed the night before). I plumped for eggs benedict with smoked salmon.I will freely admit to not being very good at poaching eggs or making hollandaise sauce. I usually poach my eggs for too long, so they aren't runny by the time I pull them out. I can make hollandaise, but it never tastes like it should.
The eggs were fine. The smoked salmon was fine. The bread was fine. The hollandaise came as a lumpy lump perched on top, and it rapidly separated into water and melted butter. At first I thought they had just dropped a lump of mangled butter on top of my eggs, but a taste test confirmed that it was hollandaise. Very badly made hollandaise. Even mine doesn't separate on contact with eggs. And there was not much of it either. Call me a fat bastard, but I like my eggs benedict to be swimming in a soup of hollandaise. Soup is the operative word - a sauce should be sauce like, not lumpy like. The only sauce that should be hard and lumpy is that chocolate sauce that you squeeze out of a bottle onto ice cream. Instead, I had a dainty little spoonful of rapidly decomposing (or should that be deconstructing?) hollandaise chunks perched on top of my eggs, and it barely covered the yolk of one egg. Maybe that is how breakfast was served in wartime London when butter was rashioned.
The general size of the breakfast was also disappointing. One good thing that they had on the menu was a kids breakfast, but I got the feeling afterwards that I had somehow ended up with a kiddy serving rather than a starving adult serving. I had to follow up with some toast and jam in order to stop the growling stomach. It was tough ordering that. I had to send one of the guys at the end of the table inside on a mission to place an order for toast, and he ended up having to order several lots as there was more than one growling stomach around the table.
When we went in to pay, I found that they had some amazing looking cakes and things on the counter. Flourless chocolate cakes and that sort of thing. However, after putting up with watery coffee, slack service, tiny servings and a 10% Sunday surcharge, the last thing I wanted to do was to splash out another $12 on various cakes and things. To hell with them.
Next time, I'm setting the alarm and booking a table at Verve.
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