Cafe Vue at Heide
| Where | 7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen, 3105—View map |
Contact | 03 9850 1500 info@heide.com.au |
Website | www.heide.com.au |
Open | Breakfast Tues-Fri 10am- 12noon,Sat-Sun from 9am (closed Mondays) |
Payment | EFTPOS, Visa, Mastercard, AMEX, Cash |
Diet | Soy |
Seating | Inside and outside |
Kids | Welcome |
Pets | Unwelcome |
An art-start to the day
Jane de Graaff 9 June 2010
Could there be a better start to the day- art and food/food and art?
I’m of the persuasion that good food is art, so what better place for the offerings of Melbourne foodicon Shannon Bennett (Vue de Monde, Café Vue and 401) and his creative food ideas to come alive than the refurbished café at Heide Museum of Modern Art. Welcome to Café Vue at Heide.
There’s history here- necessary to the total story of the new café. Heide has long been a cradle for the love of good food in conjunction with art- evidenced by the kitchen garden of original artist inhabitant Sunday Reed. Her gardens still stand in the Heide grounds, carefully tended for use in the now modern kitchen at the cafe. So be warned, that pumpkin reclining artfully in the sunshine is probably not long for this world.
But tucked into a downward slope of the rolling Heide landscape, it’s not just the history that makes breakfast here so enjoyable.
The design is all black/white, bright and polished concrete-a gallery like atmosphere keeping the focus firmly on the art, the food.
So there’s nothing to distract you from hearty French inspired breakfasts that wander from croque-monsieur with Kurobuta ham, to the stouter start of steak and eggs.
The bread is Vue bread – freshly bussed in from the other Vue- sitting in bundles of puffy and promising pastries on the front counter, begging you to take home a sticky fruit-bun. Breakfast here calls for the unusual- just a bit left of the square- to make the most of the modern art aesthetics. And the duck cassoulet jaffle (at only $6.50) fits the creative feel perfectly.
Surely this is the breakfast of artists?
On a frilly white plate, accompanied by frilly cutlery arrives the two toastiest wedges of crunchy jaffle. Onion, tomato and whitebeans dribble out languidly onto the plate with yielding and gamey fibres of duck. Be patient. Contemplate it as a still life- or risk burning your tongue in a greedy rush.
The service is friendly, supportive of a big decision like duck for breakfast and happy to chat or suggest sides of black sausage and spinach, or a follow up order of French toast and crème anglaise. With a smooth Illy latte by your side truth, beauty, food and art become one. Perhaps the gallery students traipsing by outside should take notes.
If you feel like hanging round for lunch- there’s a good chance you’ll be seduced by the idea of a picnic basket to take into the surrounding sculpture park.
And if you keep your eyes peeled, you might stop by on a day when Bennett is indeed artist in residence.
“The preparation of good food is merely another expression of art, one of the joys of civilized living"
-Dione Lucas