Wordsmiths - The Writer's Cafe, University of Queensland, St Lucia

On Monday, I felt like treating myself, so I went for all day breakfast after work at Wordsmiths, the largest cafe at the University of Queensland.  I have previously mentioned in this blog that I am a big fan of the concept of all day breakfast.  Wordsmiths are a little unusual with their all day breakfast.  They offer breakfast options up until 10am.  After this time, there is just one all day breakfast option.  This is a little unusual because their all day breakfast is not all that dissimilar from their pre-10am offerings.  I don't understand why I can get their all day breakfast, which contains bacon and eggs at any time of the day, but I can't get a bacon and egg roll after 10am.  This was not a major issue on this occasion as I was content to order their all day breakfast.  Wordsmiths all day breakfast consists of bacon, fried eggs, hash browns, toast, and onion rings.  I know of no other cafe that includes onion rings in their breakfast menu.  However, I don't like onion rings, so I went without.  I do like the fact that hash browns are a breakfast consideration at Wordsmiths.  Many breakfast places offer hash browns, but not all of them, and always appreciate them as a breakfast option.  Wordsmiths hash browns are possibly the thickest and crumbliest that I've encountered.  This is neither a positive nor a negative, merely an observation.  Anyway, the hash browns were fine.  When my meal arrived, the first thing I noticed was that there were four slices of toast, when I was really only expecting just the regular two.  The toast was made from nice Turkish bread, and I honestly would have been contented with Tip Top white bread, so this was a nice touch.  The were two problems associated with the toast, however, and these both related to the butter.  First, instead of coming pre-buttered as much cafe toast does, Wordsmiths toast is accompanied by those single-serve tubs of butter.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the butter did not come at room temperature, so I had to wait for it to melt into the toast before I could spread it.  This is a pet peeve of mine.  If you own or work at any sort of eatery that serves butter, the butter should come at a spreadable temperature.  Second, there was not enough butter for the four pieces of toast.  I know I could have asked for more butter, so I can't really complain.  The eggs were fine.  Some cafes have perfected the art of frying eggs.  It appears that Wordsmiths is not one of these cafes.  However, the eggs were cooked to the quality I was expecting from a cafe, so again, I can't complain.  As for the bacon:  I asked for it to be crispier than usual, as is my liking.  I suppose there is a skill to frying bacon to an optimum level of crispiness (lord knows I don't do it well).  However, whoever fried this bacon had not mastered this skill.  Parts of the bacon were about right.  Whereas other parts of the bacon were more tough than crispy, which made cutting it with a bread and butter knife difficult, but overall, it wasn't too bad.  I think one more thing that is worth mentioning is that bacon, eggs, hash browns, and toast is a lot of food:  so much so that I had to take the toast off the plate so I could perform the necessary mechanics of cutting up and eating the other elements of the dish.  Finally, I had a pot of tea with my meal.  It was proper leaf tea and the pot contained a good three cups worth.  However, by the time I got to the third cup, it had drawn to a point that it became too bitter to enjoy, owing to the amount of time needed to tackle the mountain of food that was in front of me.  On the whole, this was a less than excellent, but still reasonable all day breakfast that minor changes could have made noticeably better.