Pigeon Hole Cafe

PROFILED BY DE GROOTS MEDIA
There’s something je ne sais quoi about this café, even though it is hole-in-the-wall small. Decor is too grand a word for its distinctively retro furnishings and fittings. It’s isolated from the CBD next to a defunct milk bar on a non-descript corner of a non-descript area of the city. The menu doesn’t extend much beyond soup and panini and the mis-matched, second-hand crockery is cute but, well, still mis-matched and second-hand. Yet it all works and only a few months after opening, has become the pick of the overcrowded cafe bunch for coffee aficionados and discerning foodies.

Perhaps it’s that the range of breads, the soups and nostalgic biscuits and friands are made in-house daily. Or that most of their ingredients come from local gardens. The buffalo mozzarella and ricotta salata are authentically Italian and the panini are the sort you find in bars everywhere around Italy with neat little touches – things like casalinga salame with mozzarella and parsley salsa or mushrooms with agrodolce onions. One feels that to rave would be against the spirit of the place. There’s nothing about it that’s super trendy or knock-your-socks-off. Rather it’s the understated and unpretentious goodness and simple produce-driven quality of everything they do that account for its popularity. Oh, and the coffee’s great too.

Graeme Phillips