Don’t Judge a Book By It’s Cover

on July 3, 2012 by Fiona Ryan

Filed in: Brisbane, Restaurant Review

At first glance, Entice Me Cafe looks a lot like the Lanford Lunch Box from Roseanne. You know the sort of place. A typical blue collar snack bar in an industrial estate with a name like ‘Tuckerbox’ or ‘Lucky’s Grill’.

Well, looks can be deceiving. Once you walk inside, the illusion is shattered and you can see that whilst Entice Me could possibly have been a blue collar snack bar in a former life, it’s smartened itself up and has achieved glamourous cafe status. It deceptively large with two seating areas at the front as well as two large communal tables around the corner. There’s a great bookshelf full of cookbooks and they’ve planted some coffee trees in boxes near a small, sunny courtyard.

Coffee trees in a coffee shop

We popped in on a Saturday morning after trying out every bed in Newstead in search of the perfect mattress. We were in need of a restorative coffee and they could not have been more welcoming. The counter staff were friendly and chatty, telling me that they had only been open for breakfast/brunch on weekends for a few weeks.

We ordered our coffees and a bacon and egg wrap to share, grabbed a seat and the newspaper. Much of the furniture is recycled and re-purposed. A table is the spool from some giant cables, the plain wooden chairs that at first I thought were Ikea are from a Thai cinema. The industrial lights throughout are wonderful and best of all, they’re not reproductions. They are the genuine article that have been cleaned up and painted yet still retain the bumps and knocks of their former working life.

Coffees were duly dispatched, with the bacon and egg wrap ($7.50) not far behind. The coffee serves are very generous – a medium coffee is $3.50 but is in fact the equivalent to most large sizes. I’m often critical of coffee that is served luke warm and needs to be gulped down. On the Saturday, I found the coffee slightly better than warm however on my second visit the temperature was much better So, if you’re coffee temperature is not quite right, I’d ask for another.

At first, I wondered whether Entice Me could last the distance until all the apartments in the precinct are finished being built. Only one other customer was to be seen when we arrived on Saturday but whilst we ate, a small stream of people dropped in. I also discovered the second area at the back of the cafe, with more people enjoying their breakfast. So it seems there is a regular clientele. The other thing that encourages me to believe that Entice Me are around for the long haul is the fact that they also run a catering business, so all food is made on premises. This makes a nice change from the pre-fab cakes and wraps of many coffee shops and cafes.

There’s plenty on offer on the weekend breakfast menu that could lure me back such as Rosti w Field Mushrooms, Eggs, Bacon & Lemongrass & Thyme Hollandaise mmmm….. During the week, there’s a huge lunch menu including Gnocchi w Caramelised Pumpkin & Pineapple Sage Sauce and the amazing sounding Palm Sugar Green Ginger Wine Prawns. Not bad for a ‘worker’s cafe’. On my second visit I saw absolutely the biggest muffins I have ever seen. I really, really wanted one of those white chocolate muffins, dusted with icing sugar, still warm out of the oven, but I resisted. It gives me a reason to go back for a treat.