There are not too many pleasures to be had in the greater Brunswick area that are superior to sitting in the courtyard at Carolina on a sunny morning stuffing your face with something involving eggs. I’ve been doing it a lot in the past six months or so, since Carolina has become a favoured meeting spot for other Brunswick-residing friends.
The menu is the prime attraction, even beyond the pleasing surrounds – not a huge array of options, but they do tend to change seasonally which makes things fresh every few months or so. I’ve eaten a LOT of dishes here, and it would take far too long to recount them all, so what follows is three notable dishes that remain bright in remembrance.
The Okay, Carolina consists of okinomiyaki-style fritters served with pickled ginger, nori, chilli, leafy side salad with white miso dressing, and lashings of non-dairy Japanese mayo. That’s vegan, but you can also add poached eggs, which of course I did, because everything is improved by a perfectly poached egg. A lovely mess of a dish that once the egg yolk adds to the sauces results in a gloriously savoury thing to be relished.
I’m also enormously fond of the green breakfast, which changes with what seasonal greens are available. My favourite iteration so far was the one that ran over winter, using wilted greens like kale and rainbow chard, sauteed green beans, little chunks of smokey eggplant with garlic and sesame, on pomegranate drizzled sourdough, and perched on top like glowing orbs of promise YES OUR BEST FRIENDS TWO POACHED EGGS. Joy and rapture! Honestly nearly all my eating this year has come down to “is it a greens thing I can have eggs on GOOD EXCELLENT let’s do it” and I have zero regrets, may this style of dish multiply and flourish.
I’ve only very recently sampled the sweet end of the menu at Carolina, in the form of the homemade crumpets with native wildflower honey, lavender sugar and crumbled honeycomb. This was definitely against the extreme end of the sweet spectrum (and according to Where’s the Beef other sweet items on Carolina’s menu are firmly in the Dessert For Breakfast camp), so if you want sweet at Carolina you better be ready to COMMIT is all I’m saying.
The staff tend towards the friendly, the coffee is delightfully invigorating whether hot or cold depending on your needs, and all together Carolina will present you with an enormously pleasing, relaxing Saturday morning brunch, which everyone deserves at the end of a frantic week.
Carolina
11 Nicholson Street, Brunswick East
Ph: 0425 731 315
Ballroom Blintz 