All posts by David Morgan-Mar

Pattison’s Patisserie, Cammeray

bakery, cafe, city, nsw, sausage roll, vanilla slice,

12/450 Miller St, Cammeray, New South Wales
pattisonspatisserie.com.au

Pattison’s is a small chain with a dozen patisseries scattered across the northern suburbs of Sydney. This one at Cammeray has a long glass counter stuffed full of delicious looking cakes and pastries. As well as the traditional Aussie favourites, they do trendy new things like macarons and fancy cupcakes. They also bake bread and muffins and other such things.

Pattison's Patisserie

The first day I tried to review this establishment, they had sold out of vanilla slices, so I had to delay my tasting to another day. The next time I was in the area, I ordered one of the sausage rolls from their hot savoury selection, and a slice. I took them out to sit in the sunshine in the adjacent courtyard as I ate. This area has a bit of restrained buzz from the other shops and cafes in the complex.

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Simmone Logue, Cammeray

bakery, cafe, city, nsw, sausage roll, vanilla slice,

5/450-476 Miller St, Cammeray, New South Wales
www.simmonelogue.com.au

This is one of two stores for the small baking and catering company started by the eponymous Simmone. It’s a trendy upmarket cafe with plenty of mouth-watering goodies, including gourmet salads, savoury pastries, quiches, fancy sandwiches, cakes, tarts, slices, and so on. They also apparently do a dinner service with full cooked meals in the evenings.

Simmone Logue

But I’m here for the sausage roll and vanilla slice. I order them to eat in on one of the chunky rustic wooden tables that looks like you could butcher a side of beef on it. The sausage rolls (as well as the pies) are not kept hot – they are more designed for people to pick up on the way home and reheat at home. But they are happy to heat one up for eating in. While I wait for my order, I admire the country kitchen decorations, including a large set of bookshelves overflowing with well-thumbed recipe books, and vintage French vegetable and flower seed packets in cutesy frames hanging on the wall. It seems these are for sale.

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Vina Bakehouse, Chatswood

bakery, city, nsw, sausage roll, vanilla slice,

Level 2, Westfield Shopping Centre, Chatswood

This bakery lives in a food court in the giant Westfield shopping complex in Chatswood, wedged between a cafe and an Asian noodle place. It sells freshly baked bread and a selection of cakes, tarts, and slices, as well as pies and sausage rolls. I’ve been here a few times before and don’t have a particularly high opinion of their bread items. I once bought a “bagel” here, only to discover that it was nothing more than a fluffy white bread roll in a very rough and ready approximation of a shape with a hole through it.

Vina Bakehouse

But being in the area around lunch time, I decided to take the plunge. I procured a sausage roll and a vanilla slice and took a seat at one of the food court tables nearby to examine and taste. An elderly lady and what I presume to be her granddaughter sat at the table with some lunch of their own as well, and the girl looked at me curiously as I photographed and considered my meal.

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Soul with Zest, Angaston

cafe, country, sa, vanilla slice

37 Murray Street, Angaston, South Australia

This is really a cafe doing breakfasts and light meals throughout the day, not a bakery. However they had a very interesting looking vanilla slice sitting in the cake counter, so I took the plunge and added one to my breakfast order of muesli with fruit and milk.

Soul with Zest

I was attracted by the different appearance. This slice had three layers of pastry, with custard filling the gap between the lower two, and an equally thick layer of what looked like whipped cream or buttercream between the upper two. The whole was topped with a thick glossy layer of light brown icing decorated with white and darker brown diagonal lines.

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The Pie Tin, Newtown

cafe, city, nsw, sausage roll, special

1-1a Brown St, Newtown, New South Wales
thepietin.com.au

I’d been wanting to visit this place ever since I first heard about it. They do a big line in pies, as one might expect from the name – both the savoury, meaty Australian sort, and sweet dessert types. The establishment is tucked away in a little side street off Newtown’s bustling King Street restaurant and university student shopping strip. If you didn’t know it was here, you’d probably never notice it unless you are a local to the area.

The Pie Tin

On a sunny winter Sunday I sought out the address and ventured into the old brick building, painted a neat light grey on the outside. The interior is funky and modern, with two large display cases arranged at right angles. The right one contains hot savoury pies of several different varieties, while the left contains sweet pies. Some of the hot pies on offer include: steak, cheese, and smokey bacon; lamb and rosemary; smokey beef brisket and mushroom; Sicilian style chilli lovers sausage and white bean; creamy chicken with hot seeded mustard and mushrooms; vegetable and lentil; sweet roasted duck with Cointreau and seasonal vegetables. While the sweet section has: Black Forest meringue; whipped lime; brown butter pecan; American style pumpkin; banoffee; creamy coconut custard; lemon brulee; Mississippi mud; and “the apple pie that ate Newtown” – an apple pie roughly the size of a car tyre, I kid you not.

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Grill’d (burger), Crows Nest

city, nsw, restaurant, special

57 Willoughby Rd, Crows Nest, New South Wales
www.grilld.com.au

Here at Snot Block & Roll we are, of course, proudly Australian, and aim to bring you the best in true Aussie cuisine. So we were somewhat taken aback when the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Good Food site posted a reference to an article written by American chef David Chang about what he thinks makes the ideal hamburger. Chang writes:

You know who fucks up burgers more than anyone else in the world? Australians. Australia has no idea what a burger is. They put a fried egg on their burger. They put canned beetroot on it, like a wedge of it. I am not joking you. This is how they eat their burger.

Uh… okay. But wait, he doesn’t stop insulting people who happen to have different tastes to him there:

My ideal burger is bun, cheese, burger. Sometimes bacon. … And the cheese thing has to be very clear: American cheese only.

Wait, whoa! If this guy had any credibility left at all, it’s all gone by now. American cheese??? This stuff?? But wait, there’s even more:

Honestly, what does the lettuce do? It adds texture, Dave. Texture? Really? Is it really going to hold up, crushed between the bun and the hot patty that steams it? I don’t think so. … And onions and tomatoes — what do they do? … The whole idea of half-steamed veg on top of your burger is the dumbest fucking thing I could ever think of. And I will say this: if you enjoy it, you’re an idiot.

Well. We could not let this go unanswered. So this very day we went to a local burger place: Grill’d at Crows Nest. They have a menu with several different types of burgers, including a good selection of chicken burgers, vegetarian options, and a trio of lamb burgers to showcase that great Australian meat as well as the beef. The ambience is casual and friendly, with bare brick walls and solid wooden furniture and slightly dimmed lighting. This couldn’t be further from your plastic primary coloured American fast food burger chain decor. For which we can be grateful.

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St Honoré Bakery, North Sydney

bakery, cafe, city, nsw, sausage roll, vanilla slice,

2/40 Miller St, North Sydney, New South Wales
www.sthonorebakery.com.au

Finding myself in North Sydney around 9am on a weekday, I did a quick web search for bakeries in the vicinity. The Bourke Street Bakery was nearest and sounded promising, with Internet reviews recommending the pork and fennel sausage roll highly. But when I arrived there and managed to penetrate the queue of a dozen people waiting to order take-away coffees in order to see what sweet delights lurked in the display cabinet I was heartbroken to see that they did not stock vanilla slices. Thus crestfallen, I sought the next bakery on my search list, St Honoré.

St Honore bakery

This is a French styled bakery lurking in a nondescript black granite office tower front around the corner from North Sydney station. It too was doing a brisk trade in take-away coffees as the morning office workers began their day in the corporate rat race. Peering through the window I spied both the quest objects, so walked boldly in and ordered. The woman behind the counter reached for white paper bags before I specified that I would be eating in at the small café tables, whereupon she changed to a pair of white plates. I would have liked to have taken the bags outside, but there was nowhere nearby to sit and the morning was chilly.

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St Malo Bakery: addendum, Crows Nest

bakery, cafe, city, nsw, vanilla slice

83 Willoughby Road, Crows Nest, New South Wales

I’ve already reviewed St Malo Bakery in this blog, awarding a 9/10 for their fancy “pistachio and raspberry mille-feuille”, which was deemed close enough to a vanilla slice to count. But the other day I was walking past and popped in to buy a loaf of bread, and lo! Sitting there in the counter display were not only some of those fancy slices, but also some plain “vanilla mille-feuilles”!

Vanilla slice: St Malo Bakery

Excited beyond belief, I ponied up to the counter, ordering my loaf of bread, “and a vanilla slice, please”. This achieved the desired result, and I stole away from the bakery with a light rye sourdough loaf and one of the vanilla mille-feuilles in hand, packaged with great care in a small cardboard box and then a paper bag for consumption off the premises.

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Otto’s Bakery, Hahndorf

bakery, country, sa, sausage roll, vanilla slice,

9 Main Street, Hahndorf, South Australia

Earlier in the morning I had visited Beerenberg’s Strawberry Farm, on the outskirts of the small town of Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills. When approaching the farm shop, there was the surprising but unmistakeable smell of tomato sauce in the air, which made no sense at all to me. Upon going inside the shop, which had numerous jams and sauces for sale, I discovered the reason. Through a window one could see workers processing fruit and other ingredients to make product, and a sign indicated that today they were making… tomato sauce!

And so we come to Otto’s Bakery, where I stopped for lunch later that same day. They boasted “award winning” pies on a blackboard outside, as well as a vanilla slice. This seemed to bode well, so I ordered the obligatory sausage roll and vanilla slice. (I neglected to take a photo of the exterior of the bakery, but a quick search online will reveal several photos.)

The roll got things off to a bad start. It looked decidedly average, like a roll from a warmer in a petrol station. The pastry on top was an anaemic looking pale golden brown, with evidence of thick crocodile-skin-like flakiness rather than delicate thin flakiness. Biting into the roll confirmed my worst fears, as the pastry was crisp on the outside while not being flaky enough and a bit soggy near the meat. The meat centre was bland and a bit too dry. Not terribly dry, but certainly too dry to be good.

Sausage roll: Ott's Bakery

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St Malo Bakery, Crows Nest

bakery, cafe, city, nsw, sausage roll, vanilla slice,

83 Willoughby Road, Crows Nest, New South Wales
www.stmalobakery.com

I have wanted to review this bakery since the beginning, but every time I went in they had nothing resembling a vanilla slice in their selection of cakes of the day. Until this day.

St Malo is a fancy French bakery which does a line in fresh bread, croissants and other flaky pastries, and beautiful looking cakes and muffins. They also make delicious pies, as well as the other object of this review, sausage rolls.

St Malo Bakery

On this day I went in, intending to have a pie for lunch and not expecting to get anything else. But as I looked into the cake display, I saw gleaming there a magnificent shining creation, resplendent in its French elegance. It was three layers of pastry separated by layers of custard, with intriguingly attractive red stains in it, and topped by a sprinkle of ground nuts and a dusting of cocoa. This, I thought, is in essence a vanilla slice. Upon inquiry, I was told that it was a “pistachio and raspberry mille-feuille”. Well, a mille-feuille is basically a vanilla slice, so good enough!

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