Red Box

317 Sydney Road, Brunswick; 03 9387 8699

Saturday café lunches are sadly a rare thing for me – they’re normally prevented by one or both of a big fry-up on my part, or pancakes at Tasos for SG after shopping at Psarakos. But on this occasion we stepped out of the ordinary and chose Red Box on Sydney Rd to indulge our midday tastebuds.

Red Box does an all day breakfast, which encouragingly includes a ‘hangover pasta’. It’s done with eggs though, rather than lashings of chilli, which are my preferred hangover treatment! There’s a lot of Mediterranean influence on the menu, but they throw some red herrings in there, such as ‘toad in the hole’, which is actually chorizo peeking through an omelette. Though untried, their ‘sausage roll’ looks fantastic – it is in fact a doorstopper chorizo sandwich served with chips and salad.

I’m still craving European foods and Epicure’s Greek special had me focussing particularly on the Hellenic during the week. Hence my lunch of the choice was haloumi and saganaki, served with rocket and sourdough.
The advertised rocket was only included in the salad, which mirrored the garnish on SG’s fish and chips, so I felt justified in asking for some extra to be brought out to fulfil the menu’s promise. I needed the roughage to break up the dairy and carb, and also to balance the cheese’s saltiness with that peppery rocket flavour.

SG’s trevally was, in his words, ‘flavoursome but not too fishy’. It amply filled its crispy batter coating, which wasn’t too oily. The chips were very tasty (which makes that sausage roll an all the more promising choice on a return visit). The fish came with a homemade tartare sauce, chunky with capers, which actually went a treat on the sourdough under the rocket and Greek cheese.

Red Box serves good, fair trade, organic coffee. They also have a lovely wine list, with an intelligent selection by the glass ranging from $4.50 to $7.00, including a Hunter Valley Verdelho which was a great match for my meal