It's been so long. Some of us had covid, then I had covid, then it was Easter... I missed our breakfasts so much! Two weeks of isolation almost drove me insane, honestly. But now we are free, and very last minute we decided on breakfast at Oar, a... cafe? thing? at a rowing club about five minutes from my childhood home.
WebsiteToday we got chips. Don't we always get chips? What I wouldn't give for like... pancakes with a side of mashed potatoes. An entire baked spud. God, I should find somewhere that does good baked potatoes some time. I guess I could have gone with hash browns, but they were on the menu as $4.50 for hashbrown (singular), which... it later turned out was in fact hash browns (plural) but not until after we'd ordered.
Anyway, they were good chips. I'm running out of things to say about good chips - crunchy, salty, you know what good chips are like. They came with roasted garlic aioli, which... is possibly meant to be meaningfully different from normal garlic aioli? I didn't notice any distinct roasted-ness, myself. We had some smoked salt on the table, that was really good, although it didn't add to the chips as much as I hoped it would. Do not by any means interpret this as disappointment with the overall experience, however; if anything, this is a reflection on my failure to put smoked salt on food without it bouncing off and ending up on my plate.
I also got pancakes - Pina Colada pancakes, apparently - and a strawberry milkshake, which I feel is becoming something of a trend for me. Maybe I should go review those instead? But then I couldn't write about potatoes as much.
The milkshake was... well, milkshake. Not bad, not particularly impressive, as far as such things go. It was visibly full of seeds, and I worried about the possibly grainy texture, but that wasn't an issue. It just lacked a bit of flavour for me, I think. It was also topped with various flowers, which were pretty and A E S T H E T I C but did no favours for the drink culinarily; I wonder if, in fact, they were intended that way at all. I found an entire frozen strawberry at the bottom, that was a cool (heh) surprise.
The pancakes were a fascinating experience, which I mean genuinely and not necessarily negatively in any way, they weren't bad, just odd. They were small and thick, a little dry and a little dense, which I think are my only real complaints, and they aren't strong complaints because both were in a valid range. They claimed to be coconut, but personally I couldn't taste it much. But the real interesting part of these pancakes is everything else. Strawberries and banana were typical. But passionfruit. Small slices of meringue. Chunks of macadamia. Macadamias on pancakes? Fascinating. The passionfruit curd was a bit of a miss, for me; it was surprisingly strong and acidic, enough that it didn't quite work with anything else. There also wasn't really enough of it to spread properly on the pancakes, which I presume was the intended approach. Generally, the pancakes were okay and everything else was quite nice, but those two halves did not fit together. I would have liked all of the accompaniments in double their quantities as a side salad of sorts, but the assortment didn't work as a pancake topping.
Having said that, none of the other components were actually topping the pancakes (in that they weren't physically on top of them, stop imagining my breakfast doing that), they were presented with a healthy dose of pancake-oriented social distancing, which makes me wonder if the intention was as disconnected as its components; maple syrup for pancakes, and a scattering of other things as a separate side.
Once again I find myself presenting a bowl of chips as the best thing that a breakfast has offered. Perhaps I should simply take this as read, in future, and simply ignore all forms of potato when comparing food - but would that not be foolish, given the nature of this blog?
Beyond that, though, I can only say... not bad, but could have been better. I probably wouldn't go again, but that's more a function of it being so far away and quite close to my transphobic parents' house. My co-admin and I enjoyed the playground.
