It's almost Spring at the Picnic Café

 31 August 2024

 

PICNIC CAFÉ 

Montebello Design Centre, Newlands Avenue, Newlands, Cape Town

 

We like the Picnic Café because it’s rustic, unpretentious, offers good, simple food and is dog friendly. Today was our third visit and the first on a warm day. The trees covering the outdoor seating weren’t yet blessed with new growth of greenery and it must be a really charming setting once that leafy dome is in place, as it’s already lovely anyway.

 

By our lunch time arrival, the restaurant wasn’t that busy, despite the many vehicles in the parking areas of the Design Centre and even the Gardener’s Cottage didn’t seem to be that busy, which was surprising on such a wonderful day. Having said that, there was a constant flow of patrons at Picnic Café.

 

Since our previous visit, they’ve added some small tables in the interior space where the service counter and displays of cakes and pastries are. This means that some lucky fish can sit inside on a rainy day, or perhaps that it’s simply user friendly for the MacBook cohort.

 

The wife ordered her favourite here, the chicken and wasabi mayo tramezzini. The bread was crisply toasted and the chicken and wasabi mayo combo was unctuous and moreish. Every now and then though, she was sharply remined of the hit of heat a good wasabi can zap you with.

I had my second quinoa salad in two days. This one came with roasted vegetables, cucumber slices, broccoli, peas and Feta cheese and was every bit as good as the one at Lazari.  I felt as if I were bursting from the seams from unadulterated good health.

 

The wife started with a flat white and I had a vanilla and peanut butter smoothie, and with our dessert she had a cortado, for which she needed more hot milk, and I drank a cappuccino. The coffee was good.

 

The weakest link of the meal was, as seems to be often the case, the cake we had for dessert. Mine was simple chocolate cake; her’s was a chocolate brownie.  

 

The cake was on the cusp of being dry, severely underperforming in the moist, deeply rich chocolatey arena of cake nirvana. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t a triumph of taste either.

The brownie’s texture was smooth, moist and had the requisite deep chocolate taste.

 

The bill came to R520 including tip.

 

The thing that struck me today was that the Picnic Café doesn’t seem to be particularly eco-friendly. The coffee, food and cake were served in throw away containers and plates, possibly manufactured from recycled materials but, if so,  can these containers then be recycled again? 

 

Anyhoo, it was a lovely afternoon with good food, good coffee, good service and a proper Spring vibe in one of our favourite dog friendly spots; it’s like being in a forest in the suburbs.