The Toast With The Most

As Australia mourns the removal of an overweight submariner with a yen for the cordon blurch from MasterChef, I can see the influence of the show sweeping through the burbs.

My corner café is a shabby little affair. It's in the basement of a high-rise apartment block and I’m pretty sure the space was not intended for use as a restaurant. In fact, I’m sure the main expectation of the clientele is to have somewhere to sit and chat with other mums while the sprogs belt around and run off the last sugar hit. What I’m getting at here is that it's not the sort of place you go for a fine-dining experience. 

So I sat down this morning and ordered some French toast, asking the waitress if I could make a pain of myself and add some bacon to the plate. 

She said, “Oh, that’s fine - some people like the Canadian influence in their French toast.” 

I felt that was guilding the lily a little, describing my gluttony as having a northern hemispherical influence, but whaddayagonnado?

When my meal arrived, it was, well… it was spectacular. They’d done that thing with the syrup where it was drizzled in artistic patterns across the plate (that is going to be a thing of passing fashion, mark my words) and the stack of bacon was arranged on the toast, which was also arranged. I was quite taken aback. It was brilliant.

Now, just as long as it doesn’t go too far. The mistake with this sort of thing is when people of little talent or experience get delusions of grandeur and ruin good, simple things by going OTT. 

We used to have a solid little local café that would get our patronage at least once a week. It shot itself in the foot by going all highfalutin. They couldn’t really deliver and Cornish game hen with fennel, garlic and rosemary wasn’t what people wanted on a Saturday morning anyway. You have to work hard to drive the only café on an inner-west Sydney train-station out of business, but they managed it.

P.S. Go Poh!