After a string of delicious and HOT breakfast-related reviews lately, I’ve reached a point where our binary rating system of HOT or NOT is causing me some grief. It’s easy to issue a HOT when the food is fantastic and you can’t really fault a place at all. Similarly, it’s easy to issue a NOT when you go to place and they don’t even acknowledge you exist and then back it up with bad service, bad everything. What if it’s somewhere in the middle though? You know where I’m heading with this one…..
Denim Co. is one of the many little quaint cafes along the stretch of Little Stanley St, behind the peoples’ park that is Southbank. I have sampled many, many, many coffees here in the past and always rave about their banana bread to my friends. So, after our usual Saturday morning run around the river recently, I gently persuaded (read: insisted) my running buddies to head to Denim Co. for breakfast.
I’m not a fan of counter service at the best of times, but seeing as my visits to Denim are always quite fleeting I’m quite happy to over look it. I’ve never noticed it before, but on this occasion when ordering, I realised that they have some quite funky (and not in a good way) rules around minimum credit transactions (merchant fees – understood) and minimum EFTPOS transactions (what the??!). Their minimum transaction amounts were really high (around $25) which means that if a person wants to pay for their meal on EFTPOS or credit, they have to buy a whole lot more than their breakfast alone. Is this a gratuitous play on the concept of the up-sell? Nothing HOT about it, sorry.
Move to the food however and you’ve got a different story. I chose the poached eggs and salmon with Turkish bread and a side of bacon ($14), while Princess and K both chose the Denim Co. big breakfast of poached eggs, bacon, mushroom, tomato and toast ($15). K was particularly impressed with Denim Co’s gluten free bread option, and demolished her big breakfast with ease.
Princess, who’s on a bit on the fussy side, pushed her mushie and Turkish bread around the plate – a little disgruntled they only had Turkish and not brown bread. She stuck to her eggs, bacon and tomato and really enjoyed it.
My poached eggs were perfect and the helping of smoked salmon was generous and fresh. The bacon however was too fatty, under cooked and just too much. We all agreed their bacon strategy needed to be revised. All in all though, Denim Co. served us a delicious meal with generous servings and reasonable price. The coffees were spot on too.
Denim Co. has some great menu items (including a display window full of yummy sweets, friands, cakes, biscuits, fresh sandwiches etc) at pretty good prices. Their meals were good, but not great. The whole credit/EFTPOS deal they’ve got going on really gets under my skin, but maybe that’s just me. So, back to my dilemma – as you can see in the article heading, it’s HOT….but only because I’m denied the pleasure of sitting on the fence as per the rules of our rating system.
- Denim Co. – Little Stanley St, Southbank – +61 7 3844 0302
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