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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Coffee

Sumac serves Di Lorenzo coffee and we ordered a flat white and a latte which were both fairly good quality, but coffee was not the draw card of the cafe, the food is what this place is all about during SIFF.

Starter

Brunch starter consisted of Cous Cous with nuts (macadamia, almonds) and dried apricots (pictured centre), Porridge with dates (pictured front), rice pudding with poached saffron pear (pictured rear) accompanied by a selection of heated milk, cardamom milk, stewed rhubarb and brown sugar.

The highlight for me would have been the rice pudding with the poached pear as well as the rhubarb stew with the porridge.

Daniel favoured the Cous Cous with nuts and cardamom milk combination.

Mains

The main course consisted of eggs with sides, meaning we got eggs cooked every way, including scrambled, poached and fried on Turkish toast. I took care of the scrambled eggs and Daniel took the poached and I must say the scrambled eggs were of very high quality compared to what you usually receive and they knew what they were doing on the poached egg front as well.

Accompanying the eggs were an amazing assortment of sides which included all of the traditional big breakfast usual suspects such as bacon, mushrooms, homemade baked beans, fried tomatoes, home made hash browns, blanched spinach, merguez sausages as well as some more exotic choices in the form of grilled haloumi cheese. The home made baked beans and hash browns were a nice touch and were both high quality which was great to see.

Another great feature of the main course of the brunch was the addition of a Tajine, we made the choice of the Lamb Tajine (pumpkin and feta was the vegetarian offering). This was accompanied by Turkish and Lebanese bread and included diced onions, capsicum and minced lamb with 2 eggs that were cracked onto the top which ended up being poached from the steam trapped in the tajine while it was being baked.

Desserts/sweets

As if the previous courses weren’t enough, the meal was finished with  a raspberry and chocolate (pieces) pancake topped off with butter scotch syrup and chocolate fudge ice cream. We only managed to get through about half of this which wasn’t a bad effort as it was about a centimetre thick.

The last word…

On approaching Samuc from inside the Harbourside mall, I was a bit dubious about how good it was going to be, however once we were inside the Morrocan decor themed interior was a nice place to be with a view out over Darling Harbour. The crockery had an alternating Moroccan pattern to it and the wait staff were friendly and enthusiastic about the special SIFF menu which was great to see.

This special set menu brunch as part of SIFF is only available on Saturday’s and Sundays during October 2009 but it is definitely worth getting out of bed and heading into the city for on either day of the weekend as you won’t be finding an offering like this at many place around Sydney. At $25 a head it is expensive for a brunch and there is a 10% service surcharge on a Sunday but this offering is well worth the money. Make sure you are seriously hungry when you show up as there is a large amount of food put on the table, sometimes there is barely enough table real estate available for all of the dishes the staff bring out for you.

Happy brunching

Gabrielle

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