December 11, 2010: North Cafeteria II

Saturday was Cindy's birthday. Normally we'd have been setting off across town for breakfast somewhere new and exciting in celebration, but this year her birthday coincided with a horribly stressful work period that meant every non-celebratory minute of the day needed to be spent at in her office. So we looked closer to home for a nice birthday breakfast option. North Cafeteria in Rathdowne Village fit the bill perfectly.

Not much has changed since our last visit - the prices have snuck up by a dollar or so but the menu remains basically the same. It's still the hippest place on Rathdowne St and they still churn out pretty decent coffees, which helped kick me out of my cold-inspired morning funk (the observant will notice my indulgence in mocktails at Baba the night before, also related to illness).

I knew I wanted some of the beans I'd had last time, but also knew that I needed more variety than the basic bean dish provides, so I went for a build your own brekkie: poached eggs with sides of beans, avocado and mushrooms ($16.5).

Aside from the rather miserly slice of avo (which cost $3!), this was an excellent meal - the beans fall just short of Henry's beans excellence, but are still creamy and herb-licious, while the mushrooms and eggs were perfectly cooked. It all made for messy piles of delicious toast topping (egg mush, smeared with beans and then dotted with avo chunks and mushies). Outstanding.

Cindy decided she needed something hearty in her to tackle the trauma to come, so she took a rare detour into the savoury side of the menu: fried eggs with tomato and spuds ($13.5).

Again, everything combined beautifully although Cindy's ardour was focussed, typically, on the spuds: lightly browned, slightly oily and deliciously starchy. They were like a little serve of breakfast chips. A perfect start to her day.

We've been strangely slow to revisit North - it's close, has a good range of vego options and puts together a pretty excellent breakfast. Maybe it falls a little short of some of our favourites in terms of value for money, but it's remains an excellent local brekkie option.

Read about our previous visit to North here.

Strangely, there haven't been too many reviews of North since our last visit: just Slicing Almonds and Zesting Lemons and The Breakfast Club Carlton and this brief summary at non-blog Broadsheet.