North Perth

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Blake Street Cafe – North Perth – Sunday 30 March 2014 – Breakfast

Poached egg

Poached egg

Wow. I try to be positive but having tried to go to Mrs S in Maylands over Christmas and discovering it was closed for several weeks was frustrating. So imagine on my next trip to Perth going there on a normal Sunday morning and finding a sign saying basically that lack of staff means it is closed. Under the impression that this is one of the better new breakfast places I was quite miffed!

On the flip side we had been lucky enough to get breakfast over Christmas, after 11.30am too, at Blake Street Cafe, and knew we had a back-up plan. Sure enough we got a table for the three of us and were ready to eat!

Here’s a quick digression.  I have always loved breakfast. It is not something I adopted when I got to Melbourne. I already searched far and wide for great coffee and amazing food in the morning (or around midday) whilst I grew up in Perth, and fine tuned my expectations on holidays to places like New York before I discovered Melbourne is my world-wide favourite town for the first meal of the day. I worked on the Oriel graveyard shift and breakfast shift for a few years as a kitchen-hand in Subiaco and saw it all. At the time it was the leading café and did terrific quality breakfasts. I discovered brioche there. But Perth is a source of frustration, amusement, wonder and delight in no particular order and that’s why I started to stick to the tried and tested. Even my previous favourite, Beaufort St Merchant, changed so remarkably that if I lived in Perth I could barely afford to eat there once a week at my previous late breakfast slot. End of digression.

The reason I mentioned all of this is because I had a back-up plan and I remained excited and naïve. I had been here before for an amazing breakfast and I was so impressed I followed up with a relatively expensive dinner that was even better.

Today I wanted to be positive and have a great breakfast. No. 4 Blake St wanted me to have a great start too. They put excellent, well some excellent, quality ingredients on the plate, that should have been nicely cooked and looked good. It was anything but good though. This is a place that does exquisite dinners and has access to high quality produce. The eggs were really overdone and despite this being both breakfast and lunch I couldn’t eat the second one. I got through the sausage which was also overcooked. Everything else was passable but I think I was sour by this point.

Criticising is not something I would like to get in the habit of doing in my reviews. I maintain that this is a terrific restaurant for dinner. I just struggle to come to grips with such a mediocre breakfast.

Blake St Café on Urbanspoon

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Da Vinci’s Ristorante Pizzeria – North Perth – Saturday 29 March 2014 – Dinner

Lasagne

Lasagne

Da Vinci’s had a curious name when I first started going around ten years ago, not long after Dan Brown’s bestseller. I had worked for a number of years at a number of restaurants with one of their chefs at the time (who is a best mate) and got to know many of the staff and the owners who are still around today. Needless to say it is a comfortable place to have dinner.

When I look around, the funny thing is that everyone else looks comfortable. There’s a 50th birthday with two large tables that are having a great time, and the whole place is warm and friendly. The restaurant itself is open and honest – it speaks to good quality Italian with no frills. It’s not clichéd family, but it is bright, is busy early, and tables generally don’t get turned over so it’s relaxed.

The wood-fired pizza oven is fit for the job, but we didn’t have pizza tonight. Mum felt like seafood marinara and Catherine and I just had to try the homemade lasagna! I was a bit tricky in copying Catherine’s choice, which is a bit of a faux pas in my book, but when you come here you can have what you feel like!

Mum loved her marinara – the seafood was excellent and the serving generous. I’m not sure if the pasta is handmade, but I don’t think it is. The handmade pasta in the lasagna was terrific. Eight layers with a “rich Italian meat sauce” which I believe was dominant in pork. I often feel lasagna is too heavy, and find it hard to go past the vincisgrassi that migrated from The Grand to Yak Bar in Melbourne, but the al dente pasta and excellent meat sauce made for a delicious dish that was all the better for only $21!

The three of us shared wildberry meringue and apple pie for dessert which were both about $10. You don’t normally get much for $10 in Perth, so this is very reasonable, and some seemingly defrosted berries with the meringue is not a criticism, but worthy of noting. The meringue itself was light, but gooey and surprised all of us to the extent we were speaking about it a couple of nights later. The apple pie was as you’d expect for a standard dessert – something sweet to end a fun meal.

Having been eating in Perth for many, many years I know when a suburban restaurant is average, good, or great. It’s not just a price point thing. Da Vinci is a simple Italian restaurant, done really well.

Da Vinci Ristorante Pizzeria on Urbanspoon