#54 – Have dessert with your breakfast at Chez Dre – Saturday, June 1 2013
Having had dinner at the Waiters Club the previous night, we were brave and chose to tackle Chez Dre directly the following morning. Chez Dré is a patisserie/ boulangerie, or as normal people call it, a café located in a small side street in South Melbourne. One week into the list and we kind of get it: good venues are in lane-ways and you have to know in advance where to go to. There is no such thing as discovery by chance. Similar to last week, when we had breakfast at St Ali’s, we just went there without making a reservation. However this week we arrived two hours later, i.e. during the breakfast rush hour in South Melbourne. The place was packed and so we had to wait some time to be seated. We put our names on the list, went out to get some groceries from the South Melbourne market and came back about 20 minutes later. Not much progress on the seating front. So we waited and engaged in light people-watching. A fashionable crowd, not quite as hip as you would see it in Brunswick, but definitely paying attention to their outer appearance. Harriet was very intimidated.
While waiting we enjoyed the preview of what was about to happen: A large seating area, massive wooden tables and a large open kitchen that provides the ambience for Chez Dre. While it is a large converted warehouse, the open kitchen makes the space feel warm and inviting rather than industrial. A blue, curved wall borders the kitchen and the concrete floor features a bright red pattern. As we walked in, we saw more of the open kitchen with its chefs being busy cooking delicious meals.
On our way to the table, we passed along the patisserie part of Chez Dre, which makes me apologise for calling it just a café. Chez Dre serves all-day breakfast as well as lunch, but the real lure is the pastry case. Those little sugary creations seemed to be more than just treats. They seemed to be the work of people who know and take pride in what they are doing. French patisseries understand how to increase the energy density of food well beyond sugar in melted butter in a most delicious way.
Being distracted by sweets the menu brought us back on track. Harriet had her sweet breakfast in the form of French Toast and I indulged in savouries called Veggie Petit Dejeuner, which Google tells me is nothing else than a vegetarian breakfast. Both were really nice and unfortunately quite a mouth full, i.e. we had to reinterpret the original task at hand of having desert with our breakfast by having it to-go. We chose a caramel Èclair and a salted caramel macaron that sweetened our Saturday afternoon before cinema.
Overall it was a very nice breakfast, well worth the wait. The food is good and more than sufficient, the coffee is nice (as it seems to be a given in Melbourne) and the pastry is outstanding, setting the bar very high for everything that on the list that follows. I’m looking forward to coming back – either with a reservation or as an early bird.
