Pepperberry Cafe

Peter Piper won’t find packs of pickled peppers at the Pepperberry Cafe & Florist any more than you or I will but perhaps he could buy a bunch of bluebells, begonias or blue roses? Having a florist in the same premises and within smelling distance of one’s table whilst lunching allows the glorious indulgence of imagining oneself in a perfumed garden.....in the purest sense of course.
I have thundered a thousand times past this chameleon cafe over the years and have seen its name change with each new ownership. It has always been a popular destination for the multitudes working in the area, from the medically-minded at Southern Cross Hospital and the After Hours Surgery across the road to the office workers upstairs, the city construction teams and the passing motorists in need of a takeaway Hummingbird coffee.
For me it was lunch-lust, an uncontrollable urge to satisfy the famelicose self and the attendant pangs before later in the day rushing into the arms of Bacchus and his liquid, intoxicating, internal therapeutic massage.
There wasn’t a gourmet in sight, only the gourmand Lu whose agenda was writ large in his very psyche - and so it was that I ordered the Full Breakfast well paired with a thick sludge masquerading as a milkshake. In all fairness to the maker the shake was a largely welcome tsunami of froth and foam, heavily laced with the intense flavour of “creaming soda” but just lacking the essential chill factor. Milkshakes need to be as cold as Hilda Hulme appeared to all and sundry in 1954, as we drink them as a cold drink....
The full brekky was very much the style and type of cooked breakfast you might cook if you were at home on a Sunday morning with no-one else in the house to see your indiscretion....and you’d had a night on the tiles. Cast out all the notions of healthy eating and the threatening language of the purveyors of diets; get ye to the stove and fry up the sausages, crisp the bacon, refry the potatoes from a previous meal and don’t forget the eggs – how many was that? Three, four...?
Pepperberry, it must be admitted, made a far better job of cooking the delicate, decadently soft and luxurious poached eggs, the ultra crisp, devoid of dripping oil/fat bacon and the symmetrical chunks of refried potatoes than I ever could and so I can’t complain. The food was 100% cafe food and didn’t pretend to be otherwise. There are healthy options for those of you who might arrive on expensive, carbon or titanium-framed bicycles, clad in unbecoming, gaudy, skin-tight spandex with all manner of corporate logos displayed across the tops of your behinds so don’t despair!
By the time I was ready to leave my mind was reeling in the knowledge that my highly priced(and prized) juicer, my electric orange juice machine and my running shoes would all be glaring at me when I walked through the door at home but I knew in my heart that the God of Wine would offer a helping hand to whisk all my cares away, albeit temporarily.
Tomorrow is another day and I promise to walk 15 kilometres, ride 120 kilometres, eat salads and drink trim milk. And this is after my 1 hour of Yoga, meditation, massage and reading the latest book on the latest diet.
Enjoy....