Bad Day? Lift your game

I often write about my love of the Marysville area and the memories I have from my childhood and ones I am making now with each and every visit.

One of the highlights for me has always been going to the bakery at 17 Murchison Street – Café Aurora – Marysville Bakery and Café.

This place, for me, has been a bit of an institution as it’s somewhere we have always dropped in at for a quick pie, cake or even sometimes just a coffee. It’s nothing flash, but the food has always been good and service has been fast, no matter how busy it has been, and believe me, there are times that I have seen this place packed to capacity.

On our most recent trip to the vicinity, heading for Steavenson Falls, we followed with our tradition and dropped in for a pie and coffee for lunch, with plans for a yummy cake for afternoon tea.

Maybe it was an ‘off day’, maybe it’s new ownership, who knows what it was, but this experience literally left a bad taste in my mouth and makes me question if I will go back there.

The coffee tasted alright, but the taste it left in my mouth was horrible – almost sour. The milk seemed to be fine so I don’t know what this flavour was from. My dining partner said the same about his coffee so it wasn’t just mine.

I ordered a curry pie – normally my favourite type of pie, but this one was really bad. It tasted like nothing I had ever tasted before when it comes to curry – quite a burn of curry heat but a burnt curry heat. The pastry was borderline ok, but when cutting into the meat it was easy to see that the pie had been well overheated – maybe numerous times. The very centre of the pie was borderline ok, but the edges of the meat were burnt and black. I really felt the oven/pie warmer might have had its temperature set too high, but when it came to temperature heat, it was alright. My only thoughts on why this pie was so bad was that it had either been over cooked initially, though this probably wasn’t the case as the pastry wasn’t burnt, or, the more likely case, it had been put in and out of the pie warmer numerous times over the previous few days.

It was the same case with the other pie ordered by my friend – burnt black meat.

They were totally yuk and we hoped we weren’t going to have a case of food poisoning – thankfully we didn’t.

There was a change to this café that may have been in place for a while but I have never experienced before – the PA system/microphone used to call out order numbers. I can maybe understand them using it when the café was busy, but being a week day there was no more than eight people inside. It sounded like we were in a bingo hall with numbers being called out through the speaker. Not a nice experience when you are in a quaint country town wanting a relaxing experience.

Understandably, we did not order any more food and missed out on the cakes we had anticipated – there was no way we were going to invest another cent into this café on this particular day.

I seriously hope it was an ‘off day’ but something tells me it will be the last time I follow through with tradition and make this place a ‘must stop at’ café.

Read about Steavenson falls here – www.prodijee.com/marysville-memories