artespresso

artespresso, smelt (or spelt) with a lower case "a" is a place of arseholes (and you can capitalise that "A" if you want to).

It used to be one of my most favouritest haunts to breakfast in Canberra. It's in Kingston, which I like. It has interested art on the walls. The coffee is generally not too bad and the food has been good.

We chowed down there on the most recent visit to our nation's capital, and I think it will be our last visit to that particular establishment.

To start with, our waitress had no sense of humour. I should have guessed as much, as she was dressed totally in black and had that serious Arts student mien about her. Brother-in-law made a hash of his order by asking for "soft eggs", to which the waitress replied "and how do you want them cooked?"

His response was, "soft".

"No, as in boiled, fried, scrambled or poached?"

"Oh", went the brother-in-law, looking a bit embarased.

When she got to me and asked how I wanted my eggs, I replied "Fresh". Everyone else at the table laughed. She just frowned at me and made a little mou that said, "Oh god, one of these tables". Not even a chuckle.

Then she came out with the cuttlery. She started by putting some down within reach of the Monkey, which is always a dumb idea as cuttlery within reach has a tabletop life expectancy of less than 5 seconds. We were sitting on the balcony, and chances are it all would have ended up out on the footpath, and we would have been accused by a humourless management of being thieving gypsies.

So I told her that the last waitress to give the Monkey a fork ended up with it jammed into her thigh, and that it took two Ambo's to remove it. Again, we thought it was funny, but then we might have still been floating from the night before, and she just made that little mou again and pushed our knives and forks around a bit.

She's going to have a shock if she has kids.

Breakfast arrived, and I was not impressed. I ordered the big breakfast, and the only difference between it and bacon and eggs was the addition of one sausage. And not a very big sausage at that. It was one of thos skinny chippolata type sausages, and it was just too wierd with eggs. I favour a big, fat fairly dull pork sausage with breakfast - something that will complement the eggs, not try and murder them. If I want to murder my eggs, I splosh a pile of chilli-type sauce on the edge of my plate and dunk them in that.

The only advantage to having the big breakfast as opposed to eggs with a side order of bacon and a side order of sausage is that the "big" breakfast cost $15 and if you did eggs, it was $8, plus $4.50 for bacon and then another $4.50 for a sausage. Add that up. And then add coffee at $3.50 a pop.

For what we got, it was appalingly expensive. I don't mind forking out $15 for a feed if it is an incredibly good feed - the kind I get at Circle - and there, the $15 bill includes the coffee.

To cap it off, the only way out of the place was to go back inside through the balcony door and then through the restaurant. Sometime after we sat down, a party of about 15 took a table just inside the door that we had to go through. Although we got there well before them, some of them were clearly quite grumpy that the waitress had to walk past them to bring us our food and drinks. When we went to leave, civil war almost broke out. They had an old granny with them, and she went berko - how dare we walk past them etc etc, why didn't we exit off the balcony (uh, because that would involve climbing over the railing and dropping about 5 feet to the footpath, and the staff might have taken that to mean that we were skipping out without paying the bill).

I could see her going nuts, and saw big problems with getting the pram past her, so I had to heave it over the balconey (not with Monkey in it).

In retrospect, given the humourless service, the muddy sausage, the appaling prices and the screeching haridan that we had to pass, maybe we should have taken the over-the-balconey option and just split.

Next time, I want to go to Verve. We tried to lunch there on the weekend, but the kitchen closed just before we got there. I'll make it back one day.