Our Breakfast Club

Proud Mary, Collingwood

The Breakfast Club is back (in Victoria)

‘Let’s get this party started’, was the first sentenced uttered come a sunny Sunday morning in Melbourne by an associate breakfast blogger and it was decided that it should be so. This party would take place at Proud Mary.

Our breakfast blogging tribe has been scattered far and wide recently with a portion settling in sunny, then rainy, then sunny, then cyclonic, then sunny, Melbourne. As you can’t seem to fling a cat around Melbourne without hitting some kind of uber cool, great coffee, ‘we have beer kegs as seats, doesn’t it hurt to be so cool while you eat your eggs’ eatery we have decided to begin a Melbourne arm of our blog. Huzzah!

The first foray into Melbourne breakfast times was Proud Mary, as one of our breakfast bloggers loves this song for hell or high water and screams ‘Turn. It. Up.’ wherever and whenever it comes on. Recently named one of The Ages top 30 coffee havens situated at 172 Oxford Street
 Collingwood, expectation was high. Everyone trickled in from different sections of the city for a 10.30am eating time on a Sunday, ‘What’, you screech ‘you are going to a café on a weekend that has just been proclaimed as the being for a lesser word, THE SHIT and expect to eat there, are you high?’ Well… that is arguable and turned out to be somewhat correct. This particular blogger arrived late with a keen new associate breakfast enthusiast and found everyone waiting for what had been 45 minutes. When we asked if we could add another person to our name on the list the waitress looked at us with a mixture of horror slash disgust slash ‘are you high?’

To give them their due Proud Mary managed to make what could have been a hellish wait okay, takeaway coffees were bought and we were shuffled from one side of the café to another with the rest of the waiting hoard for about another fifteen minutes.

First duty of business, caffeine! Proud Mary take their coffee seriously but not in a particularly pretentious way. There are two types of roasts, one with a nice mellow smooth taste, the other that I could not place as anything other then sultanas; but according to everyone else was sweet and very pleasant. The coffee was very quick for such a busy place, tick!

• Avocado and Tomato on Rye
• French Toast with pear, candied bacon, maple syrup and mascarpone (one sans bacon)
• Scrambled Eggs on Toast
• Poached Eggs on Toast with Salmon

All meals between $11 – $16

The food at Proud Mary was good as a summing up term goes. One of the bloggers mentioned that breakfast being breakfast in this city, you will want to desire two things on the menu with all your heart and this should cause a real struggle for who wins the prize. This was not so at Proud Mary, the menu is fairy ordinary. The avocado on toast was a surprise with a very generous mountain of delicious avocado and tomato piled on yummy toast. The French Toast was somewhat of a revelation being such a sweet taste explosion, and the first mouthfuls were like heaven but became more and more like a naughty kind of hell as the fat made its way to our respective aortas’, but sometimes that is exactly what a Sunday calls for.

All in all Proud Mary was a pleasant experience, just maybe not quite living up to the hype. We will definitely be back for coffee and maybe breakfast just not on a Sunday. So far Melbourne… good job.

Highs: Great coffee, sassy sleek interior, avocado mountain
Lows: The wait, slightly disappointing menu
Our Breakfast Club’s final score: 7/10 coffee mugs

Editor’s note: I am trying to pull together the Perth wing of The Breakfast Club but with a grand total of 1 original breakfast blogger in town for the next few months, it may be solo reviews…