Cortille

When walking through this crazy cool café’s entrance, I couldn’t help feel like I was back in Melbourne.

A massive old school trailer is parked in the hallway, where they serve take away coffee and cake to eager beavers throughout the week.

A bit further in, there is a beautiful display cabinet of cakes and tasty morsels you can grab to go, or sit down and enjoy.

Then there’s this contraption. I assume it has something to do with coffee, perhaps a cold drip – comment below if you know what it does!

The Callebaut hot chocolate ($4.5) was quite good, not as chocolatey as I’ve had in some other places, but satisfying on a Sunday morning nonetheless.

I ordered the beef burger, Tabasco chipotle, mayonnaise, American mustard, iceberg, thick shortcut bacon, pickled red onion, Edam cheese on The Good Loaf Bakery brioche ($16.5), despite being completely stuffed from the sheer amount of food we had to sample the day before. To this day, I’m still not sure why I did that (it was probably the brioche), when there were so many other tempting items on the menu, but there you go. It was pretty good. I really enjoyed the strangely fried cheese biscuit type thing, and while the burger wasn’t that sloppy, the flavours came together quite well.

A friend opted for the beautiful house made granola muesli, poached pear, granny’s apple, natural yoghurt, strawberry compote ($12.5), which could vie with some of Melbourne’s best presented breakfast birchers. She assured me it was pretty darn great.

Another friend got the Soft shell prawn taco, red cabbage slaw, guacamole, bitternut prawn crackers ($17.5) which I eyed with much envy when it was placed on the table. The prawns looked plump and juicy and there was just enough sauce to cover the handfuls of red cabbage.

The thing I would return for however, are those waffles. They dared us and we accepted the Canadian maple, thick shortcut bacon, caramel ice cream, banana, caramel popcorn ($16.5). While I prefer my waffles a tad crispier, the sheer amount of goodies on the plate more than made up for this. The caramel ice-cream was a joy to eat with the bacon, and the maple and caramel popcorn was just divine. I’m drooling. BRB.

TL;DR A Melbourne standard brunch in beautiful Bendigo!