Bread and Circus (Fountain St, Alexandria) 1st Sept

To all our loyal Brunch Club followers we only have one thing to say...

DON'T GO HERE!

This morning's brunch experience has to go down as one of the worst. MAybe becasue we had been led to expect so much, maybe because some of us were recovering from the Marly dancing the night before, maybe because we had a predispositon for baulking at the word 'organic' or... no, actually, it is simply because this place is no good.

Behind the initially interesting setting of an apparently bustling industrially-chic cafe decorated with eclectic ornaments (See the photo of the large teapot et straw) was a pretentiousness which shocked even well-seasoned brunchclubbers. Which is fine, provided you deliver. This, they did not. In short, this place was all 'circus' and no 'bread'.

Snap shot of a morning in brunch hell:

1. No coffee. Yep, that's right. If you want coffee you have to walk out of the cafe and go to the Campos coffee stall next door (but in the same building) and line up to order, pay then wait to collect before taking back to the cafe. By which time you have been separated form the rest of your firends and missed the first installment of the morning's gossip. Even more bizarrely, when asked by Campos if 'having in or takeaway' one replies 'having in at the cafe' you are snubbed and only given it in a paper cup.

2. No water. Ok so this is not the only cafe that doesn't serve you water but this time you have to find the organically purified liquid infuser contraption, read the attached instruction sheet, attempt to operate the on/off button and self-cleaning device, only to be told then that the machine was down and there was a leak so sorry, no water. 'That's ok, I'll just have any tap water' 'Sorry, we don't do that' was the reply. But wait it gets worse...

3. Menu indecipherable. (see attached photo) Oh, and as I predicted, the obligatory "quinoa" was there right next to coconut non-dairy infused "organic" (of course) yoghurt.

4. Food inedible. Ok, I might be exaggerating here. Some of us quite liked their "organic" "not quite scrambled" (they looked scrambled to us!) eggs but my bircher muesli was disgusting. It was non-dairy and, we discovered later, had cardamon added but was bitter and awful. I shared it with fellow brunchers and they agreed. But as if that wasn't enough...

5. Poor service. An unsettling mix of 'tude' and 'try-hard'. You were left to fend for yourself and work out the system by trial and error. Again, it seemed that this chaos is designed to separate the locals from the visitors. Well, the locals can have it. To top it off though toward the end a waitress (if that's the right word) came over to me to offer another breakfast because 'I have heard you didn't like the bircher'. Well, apart from indicating that one of her staff had been eves-dropping in on our private conversation, it smacked of desperation and a sense that they knew we had, in fact, discovered that the emperor, like that of the original 'Bread and Circus' fame, has no clothes! And, whiel we resisted the temptation to point and laugh at said emperor we left quickly only to let you, our loyal followers, know the bad news.

RATINGS:

SAL:  2 1/2, and one of those was for the cute waiter.

ANDREW: 1. The worst cafe ever inspires perhaps the best blog entry ever!!Don't you agree readers? GO BRAD!!!!!!!!!!

BRAD: -1. Congratulations 'Bread and Circus' you are the first to achieve a negative egg on the brunch club scale. And let me assure you that this egg aint 'organic'!!!

QUIZ: 17/20. respectable but we'll try harder next time to build back to the 20.

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