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Restaurants serving breakfast

Are restaurants challenging cafés for breakfast supremacy?

Ladro, Greville
Are restaurants challenging cafés for breakfast supremacy?
Traditionally speaking, restaurant chefs aren't thrilled by the notion of cooking breakfast only hours after scrubbing down from dinner (and let's not even mention prepping for lunch). So it was that the Yellow team, says chef Brent Savage, was "not particularly enthusiastic" when he first floated the idea of doing a morning menu at the Potts Point, Sydney, bistro. And yet it's been a big hit (with diners, at least), the unusual likes of the liquorice bread and the poached eggs in onion broth gaining a fast following.
Yellow is just one of a raft of restaurants edging into the turf more typically held by cafés. In Melbourne, the Greville Street branch of Prahran's Ladro now offers a breakfast pizza topped with buffalo mozzarella, egg, speck, cherry tomatoes and basil, along with wood-fired eggs and Nutella-filled "breakfast bombs". Sydney, ever the breakfast-obsessive city, has a clutch of new early-morning options. Chief among them is the brunch menu at Woollahra newcomer Pinbone. It only runs Sundays, but what it lacks in frequency it more than makes up for in scope, tripping lightly from possibly the city's best fruit salad to excellent croques of both genders, a badass steak sandwich and coffee that puts many a specialist espresso bar to shame. Midweek, look to Alpha. The CBD Hellenic heroes also do a fruit salad worth writing home about (watermelon, strawberry and pomegranate), but the killer app here is the baked eggs with eggplant, peppers and tomato. That and the opportunity to order rice pudding (in the form of rizogalo) for brekky. Boom!