Café Vue: Melbourne Airport T2

On Australia Day last week, Alastair and I celebrated by jetting off to New Zealand. Yes, very patriotic indeed!

Our flight was early in the morning, so we skipped breakfast and took the opportunity to eat at the newish Café Vue at the Melbourne Airport international terminal.

This Café Vue outlet is open rather long hours (4am-1am daily) and offer breakfast, lunch, dinner, as well as pastries and take away boxes for the plane. From what I saw of the breakfast menu, prices of the food look similar (if not the same) as the other Café Vue outlets. Breakfast and lunch take away boxes were $15, and a dinner box was $30. I was kind of astounded, because one of the things I hate the most about eating at airports is the outrageously marked up prices for horrible, substandard food. And here they hadn’t marked up the prices to gouge a captive audience?? Amazement!

Alastair ordered the Spanish eggs en cocotte with tomato fondue and capsicum puree ($11.50). He received a slice of toast and two beautifully poached eggs – one egg sitting on the tomato fondue, and the other on the capsicum puree.

I had the corn fritters with avocado and watercress fennel salad ($12.50). The fritters were chock full of corn kernels, and lovely with the pureed avocado.

Service up to this point was great – we ordered quickly and the food arrived without any delay. After this though, I was annoyed to see it taper off, since time is of the essence at an airport! Our empty plates sat at the table for over 15 minutes (oh I hate sitting at a table with dirty plates), until I finally managed to wave someone down to order another coffee and a take away breakfast box for us to eat on the plane. But after waiting another 10-15 minutes when it didn’t look like the coffee was going to arrive, I realised we had to leave to catch our plane. To their credit, when a different waiter noticed that we were in a rush, he tracked down my breakfast box, and changed the coffee to a takeaway so we could leave promptly.

On the plane, I opened up the breakfast box. Inside there was a rich roll (possibly brioche?) filled with ham and a gooey egg, a plain croissant, porridge, and fruit. I got a lot of envious looks my way when I pulled it out. 😀 It was so much better than plane food – and this is coming from someone who quite likes plane food! Perhaps airlines should outsource their food to Café Vue? 😉

The ham and egg brioche had cooled down by the time I ate it, but it was still enjoyable. Alastair scoffed the croissant, and we shared the porridge and fruit. The porridge in particular was very delicious – sweet and oaty with hints of honey and coconut

Apart from the service hiccup, we had a very enjoyable breakfast and takeaway box – Café Vue is a HUGE improvement on the crap eateries that used to be at the airport. I hope it does really well!

For another blog post on Café Vue – Melbourne Airport, see Confessions of a Food Nazi.

And now for some photos from our flight! Our time in NZ was spent in Nelson to see Alastair’s mum and his step dad. We flew from Melbourne to Christchurch, and then hopped on a 50 seat bombardier dash 8 to Nelson.

I don’t really like flying much but the benefits of being on a small plane meant the most amazing scenery all the way up to Nelson.

So. Many. Mountains.

On our way home to Melbourne, we flew from Nelson up to Auckland. The flight north wasn’t quite as scenic as the one from Christchurch, but it did have one advantage: we flew past Mount Taranaki/Egmont.

Here it’s just starting to come into view. The area around the mountain is a national park – the boundary is almost circular and is sharply delineated by a change in vegetation from the dairy farms around it.

And there she is – isn’t she beautiful? It felt like we were so close! Mount Taranaki is one of the most symmetrical volcano cones in the world. In the winter, it’s covered in snow and is stunning.

And then a bit of the coast as we went further north. I think that Cafe Vue and views like these are almost worth flying to NZ for!


[googleMap name=”Cafe Vue at Melbourne Airport” width=”600″ height=”300″ directions_to=”false”]International Terminal 2, Melbourne Airport 3045, VIC, Australia[/googleMap]

Café Vue: Melbourne Airport
International Terminal 2
Located after customs and security
Melbourne Airport 3045
Phone: 9310 5091
Opening hours: 4am -1am, 7 days a week, 365 days a year

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