Mr Burch: 129 McKinnon Road, McKinnon, 9503 4312
My score: 3/5
When I go out for dinner, I get most excited by food I couldn’t (hello, spit-roast goat) or wouldn’t (here’s looking at you, deep-fried anything) cook at home. But when I eat out for breakfast I don’t mind if the food is basic, just so long as it’s infused with the belief that the day’s first meal sets up the rest of it. Getting out of bed on the wrong side is nothing; getting swampy coffee and rock-hard eggs first thing makes it hard to feel good about the project of being human before mid-afternoon.
Mr Burch understands. His all-day breakfast isn’t groundbreaking, but his pikelets are fat and fluffy; try them with thin-cut, crispy bacon, maple syrup and banana, all doled out generously. There’s a bacon-and-egg toastie that takes over the plate, cheese and pesto messing luxuriously with sunny, spilling yolk. Take the eggs as you like but do order a home-made hashbrown on the side, crisp-crusted with whipped potato filling. (Commercial hash-browns should really join the muggacino in breakfast jail.) Mr Burch runs a long specials board: check out the salads (eggplant, mushroom and cous cous, perhaps, or fig, prosciutto, goat’s cheese and rocket) and the pot pie of the day (we lucked onto decent beef ragu topped with a big square of puff). You can trust the coffee, too.
The cafe is very cute: there’s dog-friendly pavement seating, a compact, busy, chatty ground floor and a pleasant, peaceful, loungey upstairs area. The first floor suffers intermittently from out-of-sight-out-of-mind syndrome but there is local artists’ work on the walls to ponder meanwhile. There’s a fair bit of stuff granny might relate to, including an old newspaper collage in the toilets, vintage cutlery and the brilliant caramel slice. Most importantly, there’s a winning concern that everything be good and nice and enjoyable: with Mr Burch in the neighbourhood, it’s pretty hard to get out of the wrong side of bed in McKinnon.
See their website.
More good breakfasts:
Provenance Food & Wine, 288 Smith Street, Collingwood, 8415 0700
Try the ‘Eggy Hot Dog’ – a Kransky sausage on baguette with scrambled eggs, corn relish and sauerkraut.
Choukette, 318 Sydney Road, Brunswick, 9380 8680
French pastry chef Nans Wojtczak makes some of Melbourne’s best croissants, escargots and brioches.
Collins Kitchen, Grand Hyatt, 123 Collins Street, Melbourne, 9653 4831
The globe-trotting breakfast menu includes congee, chicken noodle soup and steamed dumplings as well as the usual egg and bread suspects.
First Published in The Age, March 27, 2011
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