Crabapple Kitchen

659 Glenferrie Rd, Hawthorn VIC 3122

Date visited: 7th June 2014

Where has time gone - having a bit of a backlog at the moment!  MerlinFan and I decided to take a drive for brunch today out to Crabapple Kitchen down in Hawthorn.  

The interior is beautiful, with rustic, homey decor, very cozy and comforting, like a country home.  We didn't get to sit inside, but got a table outside in the nicely toasty awning.  I generally don't mind sitting outside for better natural lighting = win-win.

We could see they were obviously busy, but service was efficient enough.  We didn't have to wait too long for our coffees.  Their coffee didn't jump out at me - they were pretty standard, I suppose.

Cappuccino & Latte

Crabapple Kitchen has an impressive menu of All day breakfast as well as their Lunch menu.  Very interestingly, they also offer a few dishes inspired by the chef's travels.  A couple caught my interest, but I just couldn't go past one of their Specials, the Gnocchi with porcini mushroom, parmesan and truffle.

I did enjoy this dish - fluffy little gnocchi nuggets, punctuated by bursts of the rich, pungent porcini mushrooms and grated parmesan.  It was rich, so although the portion was on the small side, it suited me fine.

MerlinFan had the dish I let get away - quite hilariously but endearingly called the Kerobokan Prison, Seminyak, Bali.

Kerobokan Prison $19.50

The dish came out as pretty as a picture although it was also in my most hated presentation photo-taking wise - in bowls.  Argh!  I applaud bloggers and Instagrammers who stand up or do whatever they need to do to take nice photos but I try to avoid it for fear of looking too overly conspicuous.

We liked the flavoursome baked beans in one bowl.  In the other was the smoked ham hock in hot bean paste with picked vegetables, fried onion and peanuts, Balado sambal and coconut rice.  Pretty nice Asian flavours, although the ham hock was a tad chewy.  MerlinFan said she was surprised how little rice there was in there to accompany the toppings and joked that perhaps it was for a Kerobokan Prison feel.  >:D  The egg had pretty marble-like patterns, although MerlinFan didn't detect much tea flavour.

Crabapple Kitchen is no doubt popular but for us, coffees were pretty average and although there was a bit of novelty value in the menu, the food didn't blow us away.  I feel as though our ventures out to amazing spots like Top Paddock and Barry over the Easter break have spoilt the Melbourne brunch scene for us - we can't help but compare other brunch spots to them and felt a bit underwhelmed today.  



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