#mozzarellabar

To ensure this blog starts out in the most routine, predictable and boring way, let’s start with a new restaurant review. If you stop reading now, I won’t blame you. But I need to figure out the best way to use tumblr so if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to plough on anyway.

It’s a big space. Clean, shiny, new. Even the rather magnificent pizza oven is coated in a mosaic of stamp-sized pale blue tiles. There’s a Vesper on a high shelf above the bar. Red. There’s Campari posters on the walls. So yeah, it’s an Italian bar.

I’m here for breakfast. The menu is disappointingly routine with the usual prices paid for the usual fare. The coffee is entirely acceptable but nothing more. The avocado smash with poached eggs ($14) is simple and has just enough goat’s cheese to elevate it above “boring” and thrust itself into the lower reaches of “standard”, even if the toast has had the chewiness toasted out of it.

Look, it’s OK. Pop in once it gets its liquor licence and try a pizza. But on first impressions, there’s half-a-dozen smaller, better places on Victoria and Charles Streets in Seddon, which is now clearly the best cafe strip in Melbourne’s inner-west. When I saw the size of Mozzeralla Bar, I worried for the tiny but most excellent Seddon Wine Bar which sits next door. But it’s safe for now.

This strip has had some fantastic additions over the last 12 months but on first impressions, Mozzarella Bar screams of “over-reach.”