Nothing will wilt your fervour for a café breakfast faster than a queue. It’s the classic Saturday-in-Sydney conundrum: you want someone to make you scrambled eggs so badly it hurts, but you also don’t have it in you to wait an hour and a half for one of the six tables in your local handkerchief-sized café.
Enter Little Evie, whom we love for their floorspace alone. It’s been awhile since we were able to sincerely describe a café as spacious, but this corner spot on Bourke Street in Redfern is about three times the size of many Sydney brekky spots. Of course, it’s still popular on Saturday mornings, but your chances of being seated on arrival are better here than most places.
These guys understand that you can mess with the classics, but not too much – there are certain expectations when it comes to a café breakfast. Of course, you want silky scrambled eggs on sourdough, but here they are topping it with silky strips of lemon myrtle-cured salmon. The side salad of baby spinach, kale, cress, fennel and fermented cabbage sits like a healthy shrub on top of a sour swipe of natural yoghurt. In one dish you get the things you want as well as the things you need. Smart.
Cash that one-way ticket to flavour country with a rubble of chorizo, tomato, halloumi and onion that’s paired with a poached egg and more salad, but if you cannot resist the siren song of a sweet breakfast, order the fat, fluffy pancakes given the full Elvis treatment with fresh strawberries and banana, berry compôte, salt caramel and ricotta. It can taste like a banoffee pie one minute and strawberry sponge the next – it’s a whole dessert cabinet in one bowl.
It’s a big operation, and it needs to be. For every group flopping gratefully into chairs there’s another waiting on coffee and takeaway staples like halloumi and egg rolls, and as a result service can get bogged down. It’s even more reason to leave your run late and make it a boozy brunch – their liquor licence kicks in at 10am.
This is the kind of café offering that ticks all the boxes on the Inner Sydney brekky checklist. It’s got that blonde, white and blue colour palate that is especially soothing for a sore head; they’re sourcing free range eggs, local produce and roasting their coffee on site; and theirs is a menu that shows genuine care without going too far off piste. It’s a very good argument for why Sydney likes to leave breakfast to the professionals.