|
Café dining is all class on this Darlo street corner, writes Nick Dent. 
Forbes & Burton sounds like the name of a British TV show from the ’60s about a crime-fighting aristocrat and his skirt-chasing valet.
Forbes would be played by an effete theatre luvvie, and Burton by some long-haired cockney with large pecs. Perhaps Peter Bowles would guest-star as a stamp-collecting jewel thief.
There’s eccentricity aplenty at Forbes & Burton, the restaurant. Heritage sandstone brickwork competes with groovy red mirrors. Dirty limericks adorn the bathroom walls, but the food and the service are anything but a joke.
The colonial gaol that now houses the National Art School is just across the road; aspiring Del Kathryn Bartons frequently stop by for coffee, portfolios tucked under their arms, their male life-model boyfriends in tow.
Gaggles of Eastern Suburbs mums brunch here too, having dropped their progeny at SCEGGS of a morning.
By night, the establishment gays of Darlinghurst enjoy Dave Pegrum’s exceptional mod Oz cuisine. Pegrum, a Brit, trained under no lesser personage than Marco Pierre White.
He worked at Guillaume at Bennelong and was at Tetsuya’s for five years. And he’s not about to waste that kind of pedigree by opening only for dinner.
I pop in there with Dr Love on a sunny Wednesday at noon. When the Doc orders an all-day breakfast of bubble & squeak ($16), little does he expect a puck-shaped potato croquette on a generous scattering of peas and cubed garden veggies, a sausage balanced on top and a fried egg draped over the sausage. It looks fantastic and tastes nourishing and light. A breakfast fry-up that’s good for you? The cockneys would be ’orrified.
I’m on lunch, so a bold and brassy prawn linguine ($21.50) is the go. Rocket is tossed through al dente pasta, showered with parmesan. Chilli slices are fearsomely large; cherry tomatoes are cooked just enough to make them yielding; and there’s five big juicy prawns in there. Dr Love doesn’t want to give it back when I offer him the plate for a taste. Oh, behave.
To go with our post-prandial coffees we choose home-baked biscuits. I firmly believe that biscuits should be small to medium: if I had room for a cookie the size of a dinner plate, then I’d have cake or a full dessert, wouldn’t I? In-house pastry chef Lauren Dearing makes a bijou lime and pistachio biscuit ($1) that is heavenly.
A slightly larger oat and chocolate chip bikkie ($3) is more or less an ANZAC biscuit with chocolate bits. Don’t tell the diggers, but I think they were missing out.
We’ll be back for dinner.
 |
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
