Brown Sugar Cafe

25 Block Place, Melbourne 3000
Date visited:  11th March 2012

Brown Sugar Cafe is a vibrant cafe tucked in the small laneway of Block Place.  We came here today with Hui for the all-day breakfast, which is something I especially love in a cafe :)

I had a mocha, MerlinFan had an ice coffee and Hui had the OJ and latte.

Mocha

Ice coffee

Latte

My mocha was pretty standard, as was H's latte.  MerlinFan's ice coffee was average, and she said there was only a tiny amount of ice cream.

Hui had the green pesto eggs with ham and a side of hash brown.  The dish was very nicely presented.  Although it does not show up very well on my photograph, we saw at once that the scrambled eggs were really wet - not runny, but watery, like the eggs were sitting in soup.

Green eggs and ham with hash brown

MerlinFan had the eggs benedict.  Whilst the eggs were perfectly poached, the hollandaise, ham and bread seemed to be lacking in flavour.

Eggs benedict

I had the corn bread with bacon and beans.  I've never had corn bread before, but this was really nice - it came out crispy, warm and buttery, with pieces of corn inside.  The bacon however was not salty and pretty tasteless, to be honest.  And it was a bit soggy from the beans, with no crispy bacon fat.  The beans were a bit on the hard side, which I didn't really like as well.

Most notable here was the excellent service, though.  The staff were friendly, took our orders promptly and food came on time.  Maybe it was our strategic location in front of the display counter, but during our lunch, three different staff members came around asking how things were going.  I should point out that I being the klutz I am, I actually managed to drop my camera and my knife within the span of less than an hour, whereby both times a waiter/waitress immediately swooped in before I could retrieve it.  They presented me with a new, clean knife before I even requested for one.  I'd give them an A for effort.  

Overall, I like the ambiance and liveliness of the cafe, however the coffee was average and the food seemed to be lacking that extra punch of flavour.  Whatever this place lacked in the food was made up for by the good service.  



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