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.

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