New Brisbane

I’d been asked recently if I could write about some breakfast places in Brisbane and I thought what better place to check out than the Wicked Corner Cafe in Spring Hill. Located halfway between my home and my work, I pass by there quite frequently, but have never grabbed much more for breakfast than the occasional take-away wrap or muffin and I thought it was high time I gave their all-day breakfast menu a try.

Wicked Corner Cafe
Observatory tower
Cnr Wickham Tce & Edward St, Spring Hill
Ph: +61 7 2336 9911
Web: www.wickedcornercafe.com.au

Monday-Friday 7am-3pm
Saturday 8am-2pm
Sunday 8:30am-2pm

In the past, as I’ve scurried past on my way to work, I will occasionally stop at Wicked and grab a muffin if I find myself running short of time, or if I haven’t made it to the supermarket to organise breakfast for the week and I have always been impressed by the quality of muffins that I find there. At $3.50 a pop, their muffins are a good size and come in a variety of delicious flavour combinations, including Banana & Walnut, Raspberry & White Chocolate, Chocolate and much more. While some cafes will sell you gigantic flavourless muffins that just taste like bread, these muffins are rich in flavour and are by far some of the best tasting muffins I’ve ever bought from a cafe.

From time to time I’ve also grabbed a breakfast wrap from Wicked if I wanted something a little heartier to start my day. And while they’ve tasted pretty good, I’m always confused as to why they put the BBQ sauce on the outside of the wrap - especially as they wrap it up in waxed paper when you order it to go. It just makes the whole thing a mess to eat and not an enjoyable experience, tasty though it may be. When I grabbed lunch there with my father the other week, he had a chicken wrap and while it wasn’t wrapped in paper, he noted that it makes it hard to pick up and eat a wrap when its covered in sauce. Please, Wicked - put the sauce on the inside, where it belongs.

So with a bit of preconception about what I was going to get, I finally dragged myself out of bed at the crack of noon this Sunday and headed on down. I ordered the pancakes with icecream, maple syrup and blueberries, an orange juice and a hot chocolate - which managed to come in at a quite reasonable $15.60, including a $1.50 charge for using my credit card.

The hot chocolate and juice arrived quite promptly after ordering, which is hardly surprising, as apart from a couple sitting inside, I was the only other customer this Sunday. The hot chocolate was beautifully presented, with a big bit of tasty froth which I assume had some sort of marshmallow in it, however the actually drink itself I found to be a little bitter, and not at all as sweet as I’d like a hot chocolate to be. The orange juice was from a boutique juice company and was quite large in size, served up with ice and a big straw.

Barely moments after I’d received my drinks, I see the waitress bringing out my pancakes and that’s when I smell it - the smell that no person in this world should ever have to smell… the cloying over-sweet scent of maple FLAVOURED syrup… that is: not real maple syurp.

Now something I should point out at this stage is that I am a total maple syrup snob. I have Canadian ancestry and my parents literally own about 200 acres of maple syrup producing “sugarbush” in Eastern Ontario and we have been making syrup for three generations. Though I’ve lived in Australia for almost my whole life, there is not a time I can remember when we did not have real maple syrup straight from Ontario - and not the dark stuff they export to Australia, but we’re talking “Number 1 Light”. The good stuff.

Now, that said, I knew when ordering that there was a VERY slim chance that what would get served to me would be actual maple syrup - even in the syrup-producing areas of Canada, it is a rarity to get served real maple syrup with your pancakes and even then you pay extra for it. So when I ordered, I knew what I would be getting… and the only reason I bring it up at all is because on the menu it says “maple syrup” and not “maple FLAVOURED syrup”.

However, as the plate of pancakes is put down in front of me, I have to say that I was quite impressed. $7.90 didn’t get me a HUGE plate of pancakes, but it got a nice amount for a decent price. Three uniformly-shaped pancakes stacked on top of each other, topped with a single scoop of vanilla ice cream, maple FLAVOURED syrup and blueberries and dusted off with powdered sugar.

The pancakes were light and fluffy and there was ample blueberries to go with the meal

The presentation was fantastic and though I’m not a big fan of powdered sugar, it wasn’t overdone. The pancakes were light and fluffy and, unlike my experience at Cha Cha Char, there was ample blueberries to go with the meal. I found myself enjoying each bite and by the end I was quite satisfied with my meal, despite the attempt by the fake syrup to ruin it.

Niether over- or under-full, my meal at Wicked Cafe was a perfectly sized breakfast for its price and would be both a welcome follow up to a big night out, or a casual Sunday morning catch-up with friends. My only suggestions to Wicked would be to add the word “flavoured” to the menu between “maple” and “syrup” and to also add a few different toppings options to the pancake item - I would’ve loved to have strawberries and ice-cream on my pancakes, or better yet - raspberries. It would still keep the menu simple, but give a bit of variation.

- Ross