Lorca in the Morning

It's pretty hard to get your dear old Ecumer out of the house at breakfast time.  Partly it's that I eat little or nothing for breakfast, some toast and Vegemite, or maybe oatmeal (yes, oatmeal.  Not soggy and gluey though.  I'll tell you about it some day), so I don't generally want much. 

More so it's that when I go out to eat I like to have something I can't (or can't be bothered) cooking for myself at home, and most breakfast places do toast, cereal, eggs, bacon, mushrooms.  I can do those, so why go out for them?  Lastly it's that I like to have a choice of interesting things when I go out to eat, and almost every breakfast place has the same menu - toast, cereal, eggs, bacon, mushrooms etc. 

So what can get me out of bed, showered, shaved and vaguely brushed up at an early hour of a Saturday to go and have breakfast?

You can tell it's a real cafe by the dents.  Those are the dents of time and love.

Cafe Lorca

7 Centre Place, Melbourne

Telephone 03 9650 6337

No website, but try here



Lurking down Centre Place (I would say, you know, the lane with all the graffiti in it, but in Melbourne that's not clearing things up much) is Lorca, a cafe that does breakfast and lunch weekdays and Saturday.  Nestled under the side of the rather lovely Majorca Building (stand at the end of Degraves Street and look up.  It's really a nice piece of period architecture), it has outdoor seating in the lane and set back in a nicely dark interior are a bunch more (slightly crowded together) tables and chairs, and upstairs to more seating.  But this is not a floorplan blog.  What about their breakfasts?

Yes, they do have toast, eggs, cereal, mushrooms and all that stuff.  And the coffee is good, and the orange juice is fresh, sweet, thick on the bottom and fluffy on top.  But that's not why we go there.

Huevos a la Flamenca ($15.50).  Two eggs poached in a rich sauce of tomato, peas, generous chunks of mildly spicy chorizo and nice big shaves of jamon.  It's tasty, it's savoury and a bit spicy, you get toast to soak up the juices.  Every bite is a mix of texture - tangy sauce, chewy chorizo, slightly squidgy peas, runny eggs, crunchy toast.  You probably won't need lunch.

Tortilla de patata ($12.00).  A classic Spanish potato, onion and egg pancake, potato cooked just right with the warm brown flavour of pan frying around the bottom.  Which comes with some toast and a small bowl of fruit compote; a little sweet for my tastes but well spiced.

Desayuna Lorca ($13.00).  A couple of good slices of lightly grilled firm sourdough; a drizzle of olive oil, slices of tomato, lashings of ham (clearly fresh off the slicer) and some thin shaves of Queso Iberico.  The ham is only lightly salty and gamey, but the generous serve builds up the flavour; the Queso Iberico (similar to manchego but not so firm nor so crumbly) is strongly flavoured but the paper-thin slices mean the salty richness stays in balance.  This is not the ham, cheese and tomato sandwich you were thinking of. 

Torrijos ($9.50).  French toast of brioche slices topped with a spice-poached pear.  The toast when we had it was light, crisp on the outside and soft and juicy on the inside; the pear was soft but not mushy and made a cool, juicy counterpoint to the hot toast.  The little bowl on the side is maple syrup, not the traditional honey.  We thought the flavour a little overpowering for the toast, but used sparingly it brings extra sweetness and complexity.

And another thing we like about the food at Lorca?  Unlike the hordes of whitebread clone cafes that have been adding little specks of chorizo or jamon to their scrambled eggs to make them exotic and exciting, at Lorca that's just the way things are.  A family-run cafe doing food that is deep with flavour and very different from the run of the mill.  And as I said, they do have eggs on toast with spinach and Hollandaise and all those good things.  But as long as there are Huevos Flamenco on the menu, I probably won't be able to tell you how the Huevos Benedicta taste.

Happy breakfasting,

Ecumer