Melbourne - Laurent Patisserie

One of the buildings that first caught my eye, when I first walked along Lt Collins St, was this building. Looking from across the street, you could not help but wonder what is situated inside this building. Along the sidewalk, you could see a row of tables, filled with patrons, busy chatting with one another while sipping coffee or a glass of wine. You could also occasionally find a group of street performers, like in this picture, playing their old style of jazz.

One day while we were doing some shopping in the area, I told Sayang and family, if they wanted to try out a nice cafe that seems to serve some nice looking sandwiches. Everyone seemed happy with the idea, so we popped in. It looked like a nice cafe, well lit. The first impression was that this place is busy as you could see a long line of people queing to make an order for their food.
It did take me a while to make up my mind, but in the end I opted for a Ham Baguette. Its a half baguette filled with ham, cheese, cos lettuce and tomatoes. It must have been one of the better sandwiches I've had, I mean a sandwich is a sandwich, correct ? I tell what made the difference. The ingredients were so fresh, I might have mistaken their lettuce and tomatoes to be garden plucked. The bread was fresh, aromatic, had a crispy crust and soft on the inside. All this finished off with a sprinkle of freshly cracked peppers. Unlike most other sandwiches this was not toasted, or pressed. Served cold as is.

Sayang and parents went for the Tuna Focaccia bread. Her parents just love Aussie bread. Focaccia bread isn't exactly our main staple in Malaysia. Its simply just focaccia bread with tuna, butter lettuce, and tomatoes. Sounds simple enough ? But I took a bite of it and would say their bread was nicely baked.

To finish off we ordered a box of six macarons. Unfortunately for us, macarons is one of the hardest pastry to make at home. Theirs had a nice firm crust on the outside, and a bit chewy on the inside. The flavours were just exquisite.

The best thing about this restaurant is that, although it looked like a million dollars, the sandwiches were just about $14 each, the macarons were just about $15 for a box of six. Coffee and tea was nice and decent as well.

For more information about Laurent, please visit their website.

Laurent Boulangerie-Patisserie

306 Lt Collins St,

Melbourne 3000

Melways Ref: 43 H8

Other bloggers' posts:

MaiLin Talks

Rabbit Eats

Two-KG

La Porchetta @ Melbourne

My cousin came back from Melbourne for a visit, and he reminded me, to post a review of La Porchetta. Hmm, right, I did miss out this restaurant, a rather important one too, because I'd list this place a must visit whenever I go back.

The funny thing is before I started writing about La Porchetta, I did not know that this was a succesful franchise, with a lot of outlets in Australia and NZ.

Anyways, it was our last day in Melbourne, and after a visit to Victoria Market, we took a short drive and arrived at La Porchetta. Oh so my cousin is bringing to eat Pizza, its not like we didn't eat pizza already at Bimbos. You see, my cousin has this thing of bringing us around to see a Story brigde driving up and down, that bridge, and highlighting it everytime we got lost, when we were in Melbourne. Wakakaka... so whenever I got lost, I showed him Motorola brigde at Federal Highway...lol..

The setting of this restaurant is simple, its a restaurant that sits probably at least 80-100 if full. Since it was our last day in Melbourne, we were gonna try eat at a few places, you know like in Malaysia we'd drop by one foodcourt and order abit here and order abit there. The only difference with Melbourne is that, we had to drive he there and everywhere to sample this nice lovely foods.


Of course when we walk into La Porchetta, we must try their pizza. This is a large thin crust pizza, and they allowed us to go for a half and half. One half Pizza Marinara, and another half, chicken peperroni or something like that.


This pizza is just such a joy to photograph, because all the ingredients look so fresh, and plentiful. The shrimps were just so fat and juicy, olives were thrown onto pizza like it costs, nothing to make them. On the left side of the pizza you could see the pepperonis covering up most of the surface of the pizza, if not for the little bits of bacon sprawled across in the little spaces left by the pepperonies.

I think photos of their pizza came out much better here, comparing with their website pics.

Every bite into the pizza is returned by a sinful array of tastes, flavours and aromas. I was like ,ey , this is very good shit man... very good.


The pasta was quite alright la, standard pasta, with tomato base, basil and so on and so forth. Still tastes quite nice though, if you know what I mean, after, I only had restaurants like Pizza Uno, Pizza Hut and Pizza Venezia to compare with ma..... really no fight man our local pastas....

I am not sure what cake this is but it surely had lots of chocolate on it. Nice...


Oh well, I was lucky enough to meet the Legend himself, he's Rocky, the founder of La Porchetta. When we walked into the store, you could see him making em pizzas.... really, it was an honour to meat meet the man himself.... he was friendly and obliged with posing for a pic with me.....

Also read:

Used2be1
HungryHamster
FredrickTang
3point8 - thinks its the best restaurant he's been too...
minastra

His restaurant is probably just a few streets away from Victoria Market in Melbourne, but he's so famous, I am sure you can ask a few bystanders, and someone should be able to guide you there.

Vietnamese Noodles @ Richmond, Melbourne

One of them places, my cousin brought us to , was this restaurant in Richmond. Unfortunately for me, I have forgotten what this place is called, and in Richmond, you have many Pho houses on that particular street. We also walked into a few Vietnamese provision shops to look at the abundance of food stuff we can buy for cooking Asian Food.


So, when we walked in, the restaurant was already quite full. Mind you it was about 12pm, not exactly lunch time, at least not for us. We were just doing brunch. The reason why I did not remember much of it was because I did not do the ordering nor did I pay much attention to its menu.

My cousin ordered this mini fried popiah, which was quite tasty. To eat this fried spring roll, we were given a bowl of sweet chilli sauce , which tasted like less starchy Thai Chilli Sauce.

As an additional side dish for our noodles, we were given this plate of beansprouts, and mint leaves (really reminds me of ULAM). We were to squeeze a bit of lemon onto the salad, and mix well.

I remember eating their beef Kuay Tiau soup , while Sayang had the chicken and pork one. I liked the stuff they serve here, price wise, pretty cheap when compared with the rest of the stuff available for lunch. One bowl of these noodles costs about 8 bucks each. Unlike in KL , the 8 bucks comes with a huge bowl of noodles, lots of meat, lots of vegetables. Go to Pho House @ the Curve, I believe they give you about 1.5times the serving.


This must be how much food in their kopitiam costs. Vietnamese Coffee was good, because we finally managed to get some Kopi C. Had been drinking too much cheap brewed coffee, which I didn't like very much. Most cafes were just serving, expensive coffee which didn't taste very good. I really forgot which one this restaurant is, but if not mistaken this is one of the more popular ones.

Chocolateria San Churros @ Melbourne

What is a Chocolateria ? Never heard of this term before, but we might have stumbled upon a similar style cafe when we were discovering Darling Harbour. We saw a Lindt Cafe, which sells everything Lindt in it, from chocolate drinks, pies, cakes to chocolate bars.

I assume a Chocolateria is some kind of a new word which combines Chocolate and Cafeteria, to form a word Chocolateria ? That night after we finished our dinner at Bimbo's , we took a slow walk down the street to this place San Churros. What is a churro ?

When we walked in, you could see Sayang's face light up in excitement. You could almost hear her squeal in excitement like a child would (oh ok I imagined it) when she saw all those chocolaty items behind the glass case.
They have Cakes, Pies, Ice Creams, Drinks and Tapas all made of Chocolate.

One of those Chocolate Tapas served with White Chocolate Dipping...

Another tapas, served with Dark Chocolate Dipping .... everything is so chocolaty here !!


This picture above here is taken from the display casing which basically shows us what they have. Churros (the Spanish Yau Char Kwai , I call it) was what we went for. All of us ordered our Hot Chocolate Drink, and help ourselves with the generous amounts of churros we ordered. 8 bucks per serving that has 4 sticks of churros. We must have ordered like 2 of those.


We were given three cups (300ml each) of different types of dips for our churros. Of course we have the standard dark chocolate, White Chocolate and Milk dippings. All too sweet for my liking, but my cousin coolgray was totally indulging himself in all these chocolates. I can imagine him bathing in chocolate heaven or some kinda fantasy with chocolate in it.

My hot chocolate was so KAO(too thick), it became a bit Jelak before I could down half of it. Luckilly they served free ice water which helped tremendously in flushing down all those chocolates down my throat.

The churros were nice, but I doubt anyone who can finish a basket of churros by themselves. After 2 churros, the jelak-y feeling came again, and I told myself that's enough coklat for the night.

If you like Coklat, you must come to this place and try them Chocolateria's offerings. I should have tried their Chocolate Truffles though, @ 1.95 per pop, its a bit pricey, but should have tried it.


Chocolateria San Churro
227B Brunswick Street, Fitzroy
Phone 9419 9936
Mon-Fri 11am - 11pm
Sat-Sun 10am - 11pm

You must read these other reviews:

Sunny was there and took lots of pics
Of course GrabYourFOrk has been there too
I like penguins

Note: While visiting Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne, I did see one stall / or was it one bus also selling churos, but not sure if it is served with chocolate also... I suppose churros can also be ate with peanut butter, sugar, or whatever else you feel like dipping them into... (too bad no durian jam to dip those churros into... that will be super !!)

Pizzas @ Bimbo Deluxe, Melbourne

It has taken a while but I have finally come to blogging about the last city we visited in Australia before we came back. We were to meet up with some of Sayang's really good friends when in Melbourne. I am really excited about writing about this place, because, it we had a great time, catching up with old friends, we had beer, the place was some sort of a hang out kinda place.

When we arrived, that night , it was already 7 plus. We walked into a dimly lit and congested pub, with loud music playing and lots of people just mingling and such, the kind of scene you expect to see when you walk into BarFlam in Bangsar on a weekend. The only difference is that, it was Wednesday night... hahaha, happening place...


Bimbos is famous for serving cheap pizzas on Sundays - Thursdays, 7pm - 11pm. All their pizzas go for 4bucks each. Its 4 bucks for a 12 inch pizza with different gourmet toppings, and beers on tap go for only 3.50 per mug. Everything cheap, no wonder so many people hang out here.

So we actually had to wait and hunt for a place to sit. It was seriously full, and we actually waited 15 minutes before we got ourselves a table, but the best thing was we had to go hunt for chairs. By the time we sat down I finished my first Carlton Draught (recommended by one of those guys at the bar...)

I think Sayang was buying dinner, so she actually did the ordering. I had initially wanted to help give ideas as to what to order , but after seeing those pizza names, I gave up. Take a look at the menu yourself..

This pizza's presentation need to be worked on , otherwise I remember them to taste quite good when I put them in my mouth. Don't remember what it's called though.
I liked this one (seafoodish pizza)...

I liked this too... looks like peperroni pizza
The pizzas above came out within 20 minutes of the order taken, which I found impressive. Although some of those pizzas did come out abit different in shape (see first pizza), the taste was not that bad actually. When I heard it was only 4 bucks each, I really thought they might give you less ingredients.. but no wo... everything came out to be quite standard. The last pizza was the lamb pizza, topped with a lot of strange herb (green leaves, donno what it is, I liked the lamb but not the leaves..hehe)..

This pic above, depicts me glutting on those pizzas. There is something special about this pizza place. In most pizza places in Australia, they give you chili flakes at most, over here they give you chilli oil (chinese style, or more like dim sum style). You see that bottle behind the beer.. thats the chili oil. Also from this picture you can see a Hoegaarden and a Asahi Dry next to me. Those were both mine. You can also see lots of free plain water served in this restaurant (maybe pizza uno can pick up on this, instead of charging rm3 for a bottle of el cheapo mineral water ). That night I must have also tried some Stella Artois beer. I had quite a few beers that night... the beers all tasted so so only la...

To be very frank, this place does not exactly serve you the tastiest pizzas, but when they charge you only 4 bucks per pizza, what more can you ask for. No frills pizza place.. hehe.. Just to compare between our Dominoes in KL with Bimbos, I believe Bimbo's pizzas win hands down (just for comparison sake la).

T outlet is filled to the brim, the service was quite there (mostly self service, like at a pub unless you ordered food). It look like a good place to get beer and have some pizza after work, and chill out with friends. Had a good time, thanks to the company.

The Map:

376 Brunswick St, Fitzroy, VIC 3065, Australia

+61 3 9419 8600

Also read:

Totally Adicted to Taste
Melbourne Pubs