Breakfast Series - Little Brew

http://littlebrew.com.au/

One of the funkier little cafes in Brisbane city is Brew in Burnett Lane, where I love going from time to time for inner city tapas (see post here).  I particularly love the chorizo that Brew has on offer and whenever I get a hankering for the tasty Spanish treat, I head on into Brew.  I'd known that Brew had opened up an outpost (ha, that sounds like it's miles away) in Paddington and it was developing quite the reputation as a top breakfast spot. So it was time for me to head up the hill to one of my favourite inner city suburbs and check it out.

Since we have a severe aversion to waiting in queues, despite the cold winter's morning, we did our usual thing and got up pretty early one Sunday morning and beat the queues.  Little Brew is located midway up Latrobe Terrace and we managed to find a park right out the front, which is always a bonus, and as we made our way to the cafe, we took a moment out to admire the Brisbane CBD from one of the better vantage points in Brisbane.  It was a fabulous view and reminded me again why I love living in this city.

Even though we were early, there were still a few Paddington locals already seated at the tables inside but we still had a choice of where we sat. Sometimes with too many choices comes indecision and we ended up making a tactical error in our seat selection.  I say this from a purely selfish viewpoint because SC chose a seat that had the best chance of keeping herself warm, right in open with the winter sun beating down.  I'd have love the seat too, if I wasn't taking photos and as we would soon discover, too much sunlight can be just as bad as not enough when taking food snaps!

We were given a couple of menus by an incredibly chirpy waitress and asked about our drink selections, which was super easy for SC with her usual half strength latte.  I was a little stuck as there were no smoothies on the menu.  I really struggle to understand why cafes don't run with smoothies nowadays, its such a quintessential part Brisbane breakfast that it really stands out when not available.  After lamenting this for a bit, our waitress offered an iced coffee or an iced chocolate, so I went with the iced chocolate option and spent a little time brooding about it.  Luckily, it was actually a pretty decent iced chocolate and it had a little foam on top, which was nice.

The menu at Little Brew is quite petite and doesn't have a lot of options, but to be honest, sometimes really long breakfast menus are lost on me anyway.  As long as there are the basics for me and a couple of options for SC, we are pretty happy.  It's actually quite a contemporary looking menu with mostly Paddington type options, things with caramel fig and ricotta included or smoked salmon and sweet potato rosti.  Yeah, we knew we were in Paddington!

I will say that even though the selections were very Paddingtonesqe, SC's esquites or Mexican corn fritters with goats cheese, poached egg, rocket and grilled chorizo looked very appetising.  The corn fritters were stacked and had quite a bit of height on the plate and then went even higher with a perfectly poached egg.  Once the poached egg was cracked open, the runny yolk oozed out over the stack to create its own sauce, which helped balance the flavours of the savoury fritters and the sweet chutney and chorizo that came with the dish.  There were a lot of flavour combinations with the dish and it was really well put together to ensure they worked in harmony.

I'm not sure what's going on Brisbane, but there seems to be a trend away from having scrambled eggs on a menu.  I don't like it!  Little Brew is in the category of only providing poached or fried eggs, which confuses me a little...  It's not that hard to scramble some eggs, right?  Anyway, with only two options for my eggs, I went with the fried eggs this time with some bacon, field mushrooms and chorizo.  There were also no roasted tomatoes on the menu either, so it ended up being a little different from my normal preferences for breakfast (OCD much FoodMeUpScotty?).  There were a couple of things on the plate that I loved!  The chorizo, loved it. The bacon, loved it.  The eggs, well, they were OK but I'd have much preferred scrambled (let it go FoodMeUpScotty) but I found the field mushrooms to be lacking in seasoning, so just a little bland.

There is one thing that I took away from our breakfast at Little Brew, and that was that the team at Brew and Little Brew have sourced some amazing chorizo.  Not only do they secure the best chorizo around town, they sure do know how to cook it.  I'm being a little unfair, SC really loved her Mexican fritters and they did look pretty lovely.

Little Brew is in one of the old Paddington Queenslanders that's been converted to a business, which is both cool and a little sad.  I remember the days when Latrobe Terrace was mostly residential and one of the most desirable streets in Brisbane to live, but there seems to be less and less residents and more and more businesses.  It's not a bad think but I do get nostalgic for old Queenslanders and hark back to the days where people still lived in them.  (showing my age much?)

There seems to have been a big turnover of cafes in Paddington over the last twelve months, with some cafes just disappearing which is sad.  I liked Little Brew enough to want to visit it again, so I really do hope that it sticks around for the long term.  The staff were friendly, the food good and the setting amazing.  I think I could have sat in the warm winters sun staring at the Brisbane city scape for quite a while.....

@FoodMeUpScotty

Little brew has its own coffee roasting machine

Which explains why the coffee was so lovely and fresh

I'd like to say we had fresh flowers at our table, but they were plastic!

Not sure what was going on in the back of little brew, looked like an art class?

Another Paddington house converted to a cafe