Queen Street Cafe

Croydon’s Queen Street Café, which is actually on Croydon’s Elizabeth St rather than the nearby Queen St, used to do a roaring daytime and weekend evening trade back in the early ’90s. For reasons unknown, it closed its doors many years ago and lay dormant for quite some time but in recent times has reopened and is once again enjoying a brisk daytime trade especially on Saturdays and Sundays when many use the rustic café to partake in brunch. It has also reopened again for dinner, albeit only on Friday evenings.

Entrées, which come as a selection of five small portions for $10 per head, serve as tasty appetisers and chef offers a concise but interesting main menu that includes such dishes as rabbit casserole stew (pictured), slow-cooked lamb shanks and Thai salmon fish cakes as well as a bouillabaisse. There are also side serves of roasted pumpkin and red onion, roasted baby beets and salsa as well as steamed broccolini with lemon.
Corkage is $15 per bottle so unless you have a special wine to take and already know what you are going to eat, it’s probably best to just avail yourself of something from the café’s small but quite acceptable drinks list. The mains are also reasonably priced - $25 tops - for a venue of this calibre.
We greatly enjoyed the small portion entrées and then settled back for our main course having ordered bouillabaisse and also rabbit casserole with a side serve of roasted pumpkin. The bouillabaisse was a local seafood combination infused with saffron and served in a rustic, brown earthenware bowl. Likewise the delicious rabbit casserole was also served in an earthenware bowl to match the café’s rustic surroundings and had been slowly cooked in a mustard sauce and came with two pieces of thin bread which had been lightly grilled. The meat, of which there was plenty, literally fell from the bone. The roasted pumpkin and red onion side dish had also been cooked to perfection with the vegetable virtually melting in the mouth. The service was friendly and courteous without being at all overbearing.
Surprisingly we were among only a few other dinners on this particular Friday evening – a gaggle of girls seems to be enjoying a good night out at another table - considering that the café does very good trade at other times. If you live in the western suburbs, check out Queen Street Café for dinner as what seems like a trial period of Friday evening meals now looks like continuing until at least the end of August. With plenty of outdoor seating, it may well again be doing a thriving trade during the summer months as it did almost 20 years ago.

QUEEN STREET CAFÉ

by Robert Dunstan

ADDRESS: 12 Elizabeth St, Croydon

PHONE: 8340 0708

OPEN: From early until 4pm from Wednesay until Sunday and until early until 10pm on Friday.

CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO OUR E-NEWSLETTER!