Recently my dearest partner in greatness and I moved across town-- south to north of the river, which everyone knows is a terribly significant move, and one that I felt particularly pleased with, since I've always felt much more of a northie. We moved from Ormond-- which was such a gastronomic wasteland it doesn't even bear writing about-- to Fairfield, which looked really promising with it's little strip of shops and smattering of cafes. It seemed a tiny bit hip (barely, but it's all relative) and still definitely very much a real suburb, rather than one of those places where you can get a really swish latte in a asymmetrical glass. But no bread or newspapers or library books. Fairfield has 4 independent grocers, which is pretty amazing since there are only about 20 shops on the strip. And it has a Baker's Delight, which is so twee-ly suburban for this neck of the woods. I love that Baker's Delight, with it's 90s-style pull-aparts and the non-organic white loaves. Anyway. Fairfield seemed promising .We had visions of breakfasts where they might serve vodka-infused trout on a bagel with hollandaise (like The Artful Dodger, in Elsternwick) and where we could have leisurely glasses of wine on a Saturday, whilst not feeling like we needed to shop for vintage clothing in order to leave the house.
But in truth, Fairfield is a B-grade suburb. There are a number of cafes, this is true. And the coffee is nothing to be ashamed of. I've had no burnt milk, though I have had a few luke warm coffees, and some of them have taken quite a while to come (classic errors of a B grade cafe). We've even had a brunch that was tasty enough, though we did have to eat the rather dated dish of bangers and mash and french toast with bacon to find something palatable.
However, there have been some sorry tales too. We ate brekky at The Lemon Tree because it was such a nice little set up. Comfortable chairs, lots of wood, nice open spaces, quiet street. It was a horrible breakfast. My poached eggs were boiled to oblivion and the 'cream cheese' was a tiny scraping dotted with dried out capers. The toast had no butter, just this bare coverage of dried out eggs and pitiful amounts of cheese. Ugh. I couldn't finish it. The salmon was okay, but it's hard to really get that wrong without actually giving someone food poisoning.
They told us they'd 'make it up to us next time'. They told us this without our even complaining-- they asked if the eggs were overcooked. Which begs the question of why they let the eggs be served so horribly (and the rest) and why they didn't think it would be better to make it up to us THIS TIME by NOT serving us HORRIBLE FOOD. It was a fairly feeble response, furthermore, given that they didn't ask our names or give any indication that they might devise some method of recognising us once we came back. Or what they would do to make it up to us. But of course, we were not going back, anyway.
We've had much delayed, then lost, focaccias at the Bean Counter. We've had the bangers and mash (again, very 90s) and french toast with bacon (could've cooked it at home) which tasted quite nice at the Station Cafe. But the metal backed chairs in the middle of the room (all the tables, apart from one sort of dark and too-far-from-the-heater booth are like this) and the noisily roasting beans (it's nice that the roast the beans, admittedly, on site) really kill the atmosphere to the extent that I'd rather eat at home in my tiny apartment. It's as if the cafe owners are all assuming that we're literally going there to eat, when surely going to a cafe is usually a much more loaded and kind of aspirational experience than that. I want to eat things, for a start, that are interesting and varied. I have been to enough cafes that I am not blown away by scrambled eggs and bacon. But more than that, I want to eat somewhere that is, I suppose, a version of what I would do with my own house or dining room or even, my own cafe, if money was no object, or if my job was really about making such a room into the right kind of space. Because if I want to eat somewhere that is merely functional and clearly defined by the limitations of time and money, then I can eat at home, frankly. Or if I don't want to cook, I can get take away. Eating out is supposed to be at least just a little bit nicer than that.
As for drinking wine, we could go to the 'wine bar'/Happy Days throwback that is tacked on to the pizza place. It looks like nice pizza but really, wine bar is a bit of a stretch. Instead we went to the Greek place-- Trapezi. Which looks like a really great restaurant, but isn't really suitable for wine. For a start, they only have a couple of wines and secondly, the restaurant gets really busy and there's nowhere separate to have a drink. Which is fine, because it looks like a gorgeous restaurant. But there's still really nowhere to have a drink. So we sat outside in winter and drank house white. Not quite my vision.
I could go on to write off a few other venues based on atmosphere or cluelessness. But it essentially boils down to Fairfield really gentrifying itself in a bit of a cheapy, non-interesting way. I'm all for maintaining the provision of non-hipster venues. But I would prefer that the streets weren't proliferated with uncomfortable or poorly managed versions of what a groovier suburb has to offer. Perhaps it comes down to Fairfield's somewhat in-betweener status, geographically and in other ways. It's not an inner suburb in feel or proximity. It's near Ivanhoe and Kew, which aren't inner either, but they're posh, so it doesn't matter. Fairfield isn't posh. It's not terribly multicultural-- Preston, Brunswick and Coburg are nearby and all a lot cooler in that regard. And yet, Fairfield is really in a great location-- close to the freeway, close to town without being close enough to be terribly expensive. It's got a 'village-feel' as deemed by the Fairfield council website (which means that there's not many cars there and no real supermarket, as far as I can tell). So it's going to attract people who want to eat in cafes. But there's something distinctly different to the way that a suburb like Fitzroy or Brunswick has become gradually tarted up. The gentrification of Fairfield, whilst happening, is rather tediously moderate and uninteresting. I suspect that it's never been cheap enough to attract the artists and students that other suburbs have relied on to enliven their streets in a way that often sets a suburb up for rapid, and often more interesting, gentrification (not without it's problems) which tends to lead on to good food, in Melbourne, at least.
Fairfield is quite a nice place to live, and it's not without cafes and the like. They're just B grade. As is the suburb. B is good (I'm always telling my students that-- there's no shame in a B). But B means that I'll keep going to Northcote for lunch, I think.
Next time, I'm going to post about a place I really like! I already have a couple in mind.
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