Showing posts with label victoria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label victoria. Show all posts

12 May 2012

L'Espresso - Ballarat, Victoria

L'Espresso in Ballarat is my absolute favourite breakfast spot in Australia. We stay in Ballarat every time on our way to Melbourne just so we can wake up and go straight to L'Espresso.

Inside L'Espresso

They're in one of Ballarat's cool heritage buildings on Sturt Street and there's always some smooth tunes playing from their wall of CDs. The chalkboard to the left of the entrance shows a list of new arrivals in their music collection.

inside L'Espresso

This is a real cafe with all the good stuff including a coffee machine made by Faema, Italy’s number one professional espresso machine manufacturer.

Darren says the coffee is awesome

The coffee, according to my cafe latte drinking hubby, is superb. Just like what you would find in some of Europe's best cafes. Smooth and delicious.

Cafe Latte

If you aren't a coffee drinker, I recommend the fresh squeezed orange juice. There's minimal pulp and the taste is absolutely perfect.

perfect Freshly Squeezed Orange Juice

And here it is, my favourite breakfast in all of Australia! It's the Free Range Eggs (scrambled) with Bacon Tomato and Toast ($14.50). The eggs are silky smooth and perfectly cooked. The bacon is lean and tasty. The tomatoes are a deep red colour, not that pale supermarket crap, and nicely grilled with a beautiful pesto on top. The toast is fluffy turkish bread with a slight toasted crunch on the outside and soft in the middle. And oh the butter!

Free Range Scrambled Eggs & Bacon - best breakfast ever!

Or here's the Eggs Benedict ($16.50) with those grilled tomatoes, poached free range eggs, grilled ham and hollandaise sauce on an English muffin.

Yum

There are plenty of other options for breakfast too such as fritters, pancakes, lamb's fry, muesli, toast, croissants, etc. I'm sure you'll find plenty to love. L'Espresso is also open for lunch everyday, serving up traditional Italian fare like pastas and open focaccias. They're sometimes open on Friday and Saturday evenings for dinner as well. If you're in Ballarat, don't pass up the opportunity to visit L'Espresso!

L'Espresso on Urbanspoon

18 July 2010

Camy Shanghai Dumpling Restaurant in Melbourne

OK readers of The Lonely Plate, I've done a bit of traveling and a lot of eating so I've got a lot of posts saved up to share with you. To start off this little travel series, I'd like to tell you about one of our favorite places to chow down for cheap in Melbourne: Camy Shanghai Dumpling Restaurant. It's located on the edge of Chinatown on Tattersalls Lane (a bit of an alleyway) between Little Bourke and Lonsdale. This place pretty much rules because they're fast, really cheap, healthy and they have free self-serve tea! They're always busy and staff can be quite rude at times, but you'll never wait long and you can always count on leaving full and satisfied for a good price.

I'm a huge fan of their Chinese Broccoli. They put this awesome brown sauce over the greens that's a little bit sweet and makes them extra delicious.

Chinese Broccoli

Free tea also pictured above - don't forget it's self serve along with the plates, cups, cutlery, etc located in a little cubby area around to the right of the main entrance as you come in.

Free self-serve Tea

Being a dumpling restaurant, they have quite a few dumpling choices. I'm definitely a fan of the steamed dumplings over the fried, but this is just personal preference. If you like prawns and don't mind fairly strong spinach flavour, I recommend the spinach and prawn:

Prawn & Spinach Dumplings

Or of course you can't go wrong (unless you're a vegetarian of course) with the classic pork:

Steamed Dumplings

If you can eat a lot of dumplings, you can get like 15 or 20 for $6 so don't be shy.

Their noodle dishes are pretty tasty also. This trip we stopped here for a quick, cheap feed with some free hot tea on a cold winter's day before catching our flight to the USA. Next time you're hungry in Melbourne and on a budget, check this place out for yourself and let me know what you think.

Camy Shanghai Dumpling on Urbanspoon