A dire shortage of bacon and eggs

As far as I am concerned, a breakfast without bacon and eggs is not much of a feed. That means I have a problem with this end of the suburb. Our closest shopping area is Five Dock, and Five Dock is a Little Italia. This photo shows the interior of one of the cafes - there were two soccer related banners hanging from the ceiling, and you can see the bottom of one in the top left hand corner.

There must be 6 or 8 cafes on the strip, but only one appears to be capable of cooking up pork and cluckers, and it of course is closed on Sunday. All the other cafes serve coffee, cakes and gellato. I have no idea what the local eyeties do for breakfast - surely they can't live on short blacks and canolli's?

We had lunch in this cafe because you can't do breakfast there. It was no good. I am not going back. The thing that infuriated me about it was that it is a tiny little place, but you have to order and pay at the counter. Look at where we were sitting in relation to the counter - the lazy sods could have called out, "what do you want?" and I could have called the order back without raising my voice. There are no tables to my right - just the shop wall.

I'm all for importing Italian cuisinne and coffee, but do we have to import Italian service? It's been 15 years since I was in Italy, but I recall the service as being generally appalling. Rude, indifferent and so sexist, it made my eyes water. All the good Italian waiters migrate to London. The ones that are left are the bottom of the bucket. Some good ones seem to have made it to Australia, if our experience at the local pizza shop last week was any indication.

Tourism has wrecked the Italian service culture - especially in the big cities. The tourists won't be back next week anyway, so why give them good service?

I do recall that the Italians had the most bizarre ordering and paying methods known to man. You went to one counter, had a look and worked out what you wanted. Then you went to another counter and got a number on a ticket. Then you went to another counter and paid. Then you went back to the first counter to get your gellato. It was fucking hopeless. OK, maybe it created lots of employment, but it also created lots of frustration. It was one step up from queuing for non-existant food in Russia.

To cap it off, the Italians do not know how to queue. More on that later.

Anyway, the cafe pictured above seems to have imported Roman techniques of non-service. Enough said.

Just in case you don't believe my posts about living in Italy, check out this photo. This house is a few blocks from ours.

I love it - white picket fence and the Italian flag. I don't remember seeing too many white picket fences in Italy.