Long Track Pantry

Walking into the cafe the old floorboards creak under each step, the walls are lined with country style kitchen wares and people are welcomed in with a tasting plate of local jams and preserves at the front door. It’s delightful! And it doesn’t smell like cow or anything!

You really won’t find a cafe more authentic. The front door is a rickety flywire while wooden benches and a rusty wheelbarrow piled with cushions welcomes visitors in. It felt like a scene from any Dolly Parton movie, as long as it’s a movie based in the country. With a cafe. And a flywire door.

I visited Long Track with a gaggle of kiddies and family members. It’s not easy to find a place in the city that allows for eight people to sit comfortably, let alone offer space for kids to wander around and giving parents multiple opportunities to bark the ‘don’t touch!’ orders to them. There is plenty of space for everyone here, and it kind of feels like you’re eating in a treehouse sans the sap and aggressive bees.

Long Track’s walls are laden with country style kitchenware. Stuff the likes of me have never seen, like tomato containers, milk jugs, and large ornamental pears which I assume do everything that they promise to do…which is sit there.

Now, the menu is only offered on a blackboard here. No biggie, however said blackboard is about the size of a family sized apple pie, meaning everyone – and I mean everyone – has to crowd around it like it’s a newborn baby just to get a peak.

Interestingly, there are more vegetarian options on the menu than there are meat laden options, which disappointed me seeing as we’re in the country and in the country I expect an entire lamb to be slapped on the table. Everything from raisin toast, muesli, poached eggs and oven roasted tomatoes, and homemade baked beans on toast were on offer. Naturally I sniffed out the meat option and ordered the Long Track brekky role and asked for cheese to be added because eggs, bacon, butter and hollandaise isn’t sufficient to promote a heart attack.

One thing to note: there are no ‘sides’, so you can’t order a bit of something else to boost your serving. You will probably find you won’t really need to though. But still, it’s unfortunate for those who like to order something extra in particular.

The dishes came out promptly and all were of a hardy size, even the kiddie and half serves. I was visiting my father so I was suitable hungry after two days of not eating the straz and tomato sandwiches on offer for breakfast, lunch and dinner and at first sight was concerned that this sandwich thing wasn’t going to nearly fill me up. The fact that the roll couldn’t be successfully closed should have been enough of a sign.

Of course I was wrong.

Each filling in the roll was tasty and fresh and there was plenty of everything. The dish not inly offered pancetta, but also a bolstering of bacon. That big yellow chunk on top of the eggs is the hollandaise, so naturally it was disappointing that this came in a clump and not blanketing the entire dish, but once it melted it was lovely. The eggs were fried but were missing that awful layer of snot that usually coats the top of a fried egg, and although served on the side, the roquette and tomato added a burst of freshness and earthiness to the plate.

The egg gooed everywhere with every bite and the roll was put together so precisely that each mouthful had a balance of every ingredient.

In short, it was a fabulous country dish, and I couldn’t eat it all. The only con was the enormous amount of oil through the filling. Once the butter and the hollandaise melted through it left the bread near on translucent. It made it difficult to enjoy the last few mouthfuls…but I took one for the team and tried my best.

On the way out be sure to stop off at the tasting plate at the front door, but don’t blame me if this leads you to buying $3,000 worth of local preserves.

Yes, the message on the wall says, 'just go behind the tree'. Uh hu.

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