under $10

HOT: A1 Bakery, 645 Sydney Rd, Brunswick

July 13, 2009 ⋅ 2 comments

I remember my first visit to A1 Bakery and being astounded by the cheap prices for the freshly baked lebanese pizzas. Well, amost 5 years on and it’s still dirt cheap, mostly hovering around the $3 mark. My zaatar pizza ($1.50!) consisted of a soft pillowy base, the complete opposite of a crispy Italian crust, [...]

HOT: Hausfrau Bakery and Cakes, 32A Ballarat St, Yarraville

July 12, 2009 ⋅ One comment

Hausfrau is a cute bakery cafe styled with kitsch 50s-style laminate, enamel jugs and crockery of bright blooms which serves an array of savoury and sweet treats as well as selling loaves of bread. Its warm cosiness was very popular when we popped in for a movie post-mortem so we had to wait a while [...]

HOT: Commercial Bakery, Rear 360 Lt Collins St, Melbourne

July 2, 2009 ⋅ One comment

Commercial Bakery is the kind of hidden Tardis-like cafe on which Melbourne thrives. At first I thought it was a tiny establishment selling only what was displayed in its window shelves, but step inside and you see that a large warmly-lit split-level area stretches into the back beyond. Its frontage caught my eye because of [...]

HOT: Palomino, 236 High St, Northcote

June 21, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

The design brief for Palomino seems to have been ‘stylish kitsch’. Look around and there’s tacky porcelain ornaments randomly resting on the ledges and dotted around the boxed wooden shelving. The backdrop though is a stylish royal blue feature wall, fern wallpaper and hanging round orbs of soft light over the bar. Only Anita tried [...]

NOT: Cho Gao Restaurant & Bar, Level 3, Melbourne Central, Melbourne

June 20, 2009 ⋅ One comment

I had suggested Cho Gao for Saturday lunch with my long-lost high school friend, despite my misgivings about its shopping centre locale, because I had heard about its expansive view of the State Library. Unfortunately, it was too cold and cacophonous (protests about the Northern Territory intervention) for us to sit on the balcony for [...]

NOT: Little Cupcakes, Shop 7 Degraves St, Melbourne

April 24, 2009 ⋅ 5 comments

Aww – I feel dastardly giving cute candy-striped Little Cupcakes a NOT. But really, it’s only because their red velvet cupcake ($4) didn’t compare favourably to the red velvet cupcake from London’s Hummingbird Bakery. The cream cheese icing and the flavours were right, but it was just a bit too crumbly for my taste. Perhaps [...]

HOT: Max Brenner, Level 2, QV Square, 210 Lonsdale St, Melbourne

April 11, 2009 ⋅ 4 comments

Is this the beginning of an outrageous new trend in Australia – charging extra for eating and drinking on a weekend? The 10% surchage that Max Brenner slap onto your bill on the weekends didn’t seem to deter the hoards of people, mostly young and Asian, queueing up for their dose of chocolate as they [...]

HOT: Pho Dzung Tan Dinh, 208 Victoria St, Richmond

April 8, 2009 ⋅ 2 comments

Victoria Street is Melbourne’s mini-Vietnam, which means the strip from Hoddle St to Church St is lined with numerous pho (sliced beef noodle soup) restaurants, all propounding to sell the best bowl in town. Selecting a restaurant can be a bit daunting for the uninitiated – life’s too short to be eating bad pho. The [...]