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A cafe-restaurant where you can stop not only for a coffee but to take a leisurely lunch close to a busy shopping mall, that’s not part of a chain or franchise?
Now that’s a revolutionary idea!
Dan Kibble, and the team that brought you fine dining at 305 in High Street, has now introduced a more casual but no less satisfying experience, much closer to the centre of the action. A 21st century brasserie has been created on the ground floor of the former 19th century Grand Central Tavern. Space is organised according to the former room layout, allowing for more intimate, and quieter, dining, particularly for groups. The more casual approach means the same menu is available at both lunch and dinner.
The selection is wide-ranging and eclectic and should appeal to most palates, preferences and occasions; bruschetta, duck pate, a mezze plate, various salads including caesar, house-made pasta and a hearty steak sandwich, as well as more substantial steaks and other mains featuring lamb, duck, fish and chicken.
Salad accompaniments vary according to the dish; finely sliced red onion rings, creamy avocado, semi-dried tomato and cucumber ribbons go particularly well with smoked salmon and prawns tossed through crisp salad leaves.
Prawns in a Thai red chilli sauce come with a timbale of fragrant steamed rice and a side salad of colourful heirloom tomatoes, salad leaves, cucumber and red onion, bathed in a seeded mustard dressing.
Wickedly crunchy and moreish beer-battered chips are de rigueur with the steak sandwich.
Slices of rich red tomato, smoky bacon, caramelised onion, roasted red capsicum and crisp cucumber ribbons are layered around a generous serve of tender Angus steak. It all comes in a toasted Turkish bread roll, which in polite company is probably better attacked with a knife and fork.
A satay chicken skewer (beef or mushroom option available) is served with fresh coriander, a dish of tzatziki sauce for dipping and bronzed nasi goreng rice studded with neatly diced red capsicum and sliced green shallot.
Desserts run the gamut of usual cafe favourites; a delectably moist orange poppy seed cake, layered with raspberry jam and served with raspberry coulis, big, perfumed in season strawberries and vanilla seed-speckled gelato; a molten, oozy chocolate mud puddle pudding with raspberry coulis (somehow it goes better with chocolate), more of that excellent ice-cream, and strawberries. A cloud of white Persian fairy floss settles over the top like a wedding veil.
The standout dessert must be the banana baklava. The chef has taken a banana, wrapped it in a couple of layers of filo pastry interspersed with crackly roasted hazelnuts, baked it, cut the roll in half before dusting on more hazelnuts, setting the whole on a decadent butterscotch sauce next to the vanilla bean gelato, and draping it in white Persian fairy floss. It’s so rich you know you shouldn’t eat it all, but what the heck, you’ve come this far, it’s too late to turn back.
Le Fleuve means the river in French, so why not go with the flow and drop in some time.