Hyde Park Barracks Cafe, Sydney
Hyde Park Barracks Café
After our recent delight with brunch at Sumac, as part of the Sydney International Food Festival, yesterday we thought we would try another café participating in “Let’s Do Brunch” during October.
We arrived at Hyde Parks Barrack Café on a sunny Saturday morning, and were unfortunately not offered the choice of an outside table, despite plenty of empty tables in the sun. After being seated at an inside table, the waiter explained the SIFF menu options.
Coffees
We ordered a couple of coffees, which arrived fairly promptly and were of good quality. The brand was Calima, which is a brand we will be looking out for in the future as we enjoyed the coffees. According to their website, Calima is the only Australian company locally roasting, processing and packaging 100% Colombian Arabica coffee.
Starter
First up at the Hyde Park Barracks Café was a starter of pastries, with fresh fruit. The fruit platter was a great mix, and the accompanying yoghurt with honey was delicious, however the pastries, 2 croissants and a lemon poppy scroll, were nothing special. It seemed unusual to give a table of two, three pastries to share.
Main Selection
The mains were a choice of smoked salmon ricotta hotcakes with hollandaise sauce and capers, or French toast with maple syrup and cinnamon poached figs. Daniel ordered smoked salmon hotcakes and I chose the French toast (no surprises there!).
The French toast was drowned in pools of maple syrup, which was a good thing as the toast was fairly average, and well, maple syrup makes anything taste great. The cinnamon poached figs were rich and delicious, so were a nice touch to an otherwise standard (and uninspiring) dish.
The smoked salmon hotcakes, well, they must have arranged a bulk deal on capers as the sauce was full of them, and was hard to taste anything else in the dish. The smoked salmon slices on top of the hotcakes looked dried out and had most likely been sitting under a hot lamp for a while.
Whilst we admittedly had high expectations after the 4 course tasting platter brunch we experienced in Sumac, the Hyde Park Barracks Café was let down by a lot of factors, especially the crucial ones, food and service. The fruit and yoghurt was high quality and definitely recommendable, however as we were never shown the regular menu, who knows if this is an option.
Brunch was the standard SIFF deal of $25 each, plus coffees brought the meal to a total of $57, which did not represent value for money. So as they say, not really anything to write home about here, sorry mum!
My suggestion, get to Sumac Darling Harbour before the end of October, or else you might have to wait another year before this brunch comes back.
Let us know what SIFF events you have enjoyed this month. Just leave a comment below to join the discussion.
Brunch at 35,000 Feet
Last Saturday morning I flew from Sydney back to catch up with my friend George who was over from London for a short visit to our old home town of Christchurch, New Zealand. I was flying on Emirates as the last leg of the Dubai > Bangkok > Sydney > Christchurch route.
It was a nice change for me to fly a full service airline as lately I’ve been flying budget airlines all over the country so along with the solid amounts of leg room, when I checked out the menu I was happy to see that they were serving brunch on the flight as I was worried there might not be a chance to have brunch during the weekend.
The Menu
Brunch was a multiple dish affair consisting of fresh fruit selection, a choice between a Creamy Chicken Korma or a Swiss Cheese Omelette and an Old English Tea Cake. We also got the standard bread roll and butter as well as the classic cheese and crackers combo with a small Emirates brand chocolate. Emirates provided us with a metal fork and spoon, but the knife was made of plastic which is interesting as I think you could do more damage with the fork to be honest.
The fruit selection was close to being past it’s used by date. It consisted of watermelon, rock melon and pineapple. The pineapple was turning brown and the rock melon was a bit hard a tasteless. The watermelon on the other hand was quite tasty so I downed that and left the rest alone.
The choice in mains was interesting, I’m not against eating a curry for breakfast but in this instance I had to give the Chicken korma a miss and go with the Swiss Cheese Omelette which was topped with a tangy capsicum sauce and accompanied by sauteed button mushrooms and roasted potatoes. The mushrooms and potatoes didn’t survive the reheating process very well and there was the traditional pool of water at the bottom of the dish, but the omelette itself was pretty good and the tangy capsicum sauce was extremely tasty.
The dessert of an Old English tea cake was interesting, the cake itself wasn’t anything special and was a bit dry, but they dryness of the cake was combated with a creamy vanilla sauce. Couple this with the cheese & crackers, mini chocolate and a couple of cups of passable filter coffee this made for a good end to proceedings.
Tip: If you’re really hungry, according to my little brother if you ask the cabin crew for a second breakfast they will bring you another one.
The Movie
You know that the human race has made some progress when you can have brunch in -50 degrees celcius at 900 km/h 35,000 feet up. Just when you thought that was awesome, every Economy Seat on Emirates has a 10.6 inch LCD monitor hooked up to their ICE (Information, Communication & Entertainment) system which gives you around 900 options of movies, television shows and radio stations to watch or listen to. I chose to watch Terminator Salvation, the latest movie in the Terminator Quadrilogy, it wasn’t flash but hey it was early in the morning.
So there we go, if you have had a good airline brunch let us know what airlines you rate for a high altitude brunch experience or on the flipside of that, any that you would recommend people avoid.
