Bright, Generous and Fresh

Melbourne flirted seriously with Spring this weekend just past. Both Saturday and Sunday boasted crisp sunny still days with clear blue skies - a real teaser of what we Melbournites have to look forward to in the coming months... Bring it on! So, following a well practiced Melbourne week-end ritual, Kylie and I decided to have a mid-day breakfast on Sunday. But we also decided to avoid all our regular breakfast haunts and explore some new horizons. I love sitting in the sun so we decided to find a new weekend breakfast venue that would offer us a really nice side-walk table in the sun - no shade - just full sunny exposure. So, whilst driving down the "Broadway" in Elwood, we decided that when we found a parking space, we would stop and choose one of the "eateries" that appealed to our sense of what a great breakfast looked like. Sure enough, someone was just moving out of our car space so we parked, walked about 30 metres and who should cross our path but a waitress carrying two humungous breakfast meals to an eager couple sitting at a side-walk table in the sun. A quick clandestine scan of the dishes about to be served indicated that this establishment was nothing if not generous so we sat down at one of the side-walk tables, relaxed and enjoyed the warmth of the sun streaming down over us until a friendly waitress approached our table to take our order.
The cafe we had chosen for our relaxed Sunday indulgence was called Aroma. We ordered two large freshly squeezed OJ's and each glass had to be at LEAST a litre of the freshest freshly squeezed OJ we have ever had - truly excellent.
The menus at Aroma are presented like a DVD cover in a video library - you open the cover and there is the menu inside - very neat! Buoyed with confidence by our viewing of the meals we had seen and the quality of the OJ's, we then proceeded to confidently order our breakfast - one of us ordered the Oz Breakfast - two eggs, toast, steak, bacon, sausages, grilled tomatoes, hash brown, baked beans (hold the bacon, eggs poached with a side serve of hollandiase) and one of us ordered eggs benedict (hold the ham, side serve of tomato sauce). The eggs were great, perfectly cooked poached eggs are to be truly appreciated and the rest of the meal wa very good; fresh although the steak was not up to the very high standard of the rest of the meal - it was reasonable quality and fresh but possibly not the right choice of cut for a breakfast - a little too tough... The hash-browns were like baked potatoes but soft and fluffy inside - very good.

In all a very highly recommended experience and most enjoyable meal that both Kylie and I will look forward to enjoying again in the near future. Well done Aroma - 8.5/10. (The Oz breakfast was $21.90 but you do pay for what you get and I would rather pay a little more and be assured of the excellent fresh and high quality ingredients on which Cafe Aroma can justifiably pride themselves on.