YARDBYRD BREKKY ROLL

I was feeling a little nostalgic this past week but only on account of the change in the seasons. K and I moved back to South Western Australia six weeks back and since then we have been blessed with the second summer on offer here, a season Noongar people call ‘Bunuru’ that runs in conjunction with February and March for the most part. Traditionally, tailor and mullet were caught, and people roasted bloodroot, a spicy tuber that Paul Iskov uses with Fervor.

We had been up in Perth for a little while, giving talks at a writers’ festival and doing some teaching at the local university, and Kelly managed to fit in a short trip to Bombay. But, we decided to move back down to Redgate, which is in the Margaret River region. There is no place I would rather be than Redgate. It is the name of the beach where we surf, swim, walk, catch crays, and relax in every sort of way. It is also what we call our house down there, a place my parents have had for thirty years and that I have been coming to all my life.

At Redgate one can contemplate, read, think, enjoy, and simply be in a very different way. I love big cities and have been lucky enough to spend time in many of them, but coming here re-calibrates you. It balances you and you feel connected to something bigger in a humbling way. It does not hurt that it is beautiful in a basic sense and that the body feels at peace when you come into the valley, walk among the karri, watch the sun set into the Indian Ocean with nothing but the birds, the breeze and each other for company.

When we head this way, it feels like coming home, even though home can be found in a good book and a cup of tea anywhere in the world. If I began ‘Food Blog’ in New York, Redgate feels like a different place to arrive at, a place where we live in very different circumstances. No more rats, no more subway, no more endless choice. Here is fishing, four wheel drives, a handful of places that you can eat at. This last observation is not quite right if only because the region offers so many wineries that you cannot exhaust them all, not even if you tried.

A winery lunch is the main gastronomic experience here and I myself have worked at degustation dinners and wedding banquets at Watershed, a local vineyard up the road. But, you cannot eat at a winery every day partly because of the hip pocket cost to a freelance writer who works mainly in poetry, and partly on account of good taste. The winery lunch is an occasional celebration reserved for friends who are visiting and want to be treated to Contemporary Australian. Here, we mainly eat at home and when we do head out for lunch, we find out where is good through word of mouth, by asking chefs in the neighbourhood where they would recommend at the moment. This changes with the seasons.

What matters most when you get somewhere new, or return home, is to find a good local from cafe to pub to market. K and I had a morning local in White Gold Butchers, the subject of my very first blog. You might recall that we used to get breakfast rolls there – egg, American cheese, ham on a Kaiser poppy seed roll that was a sweet, salty, umami, messy way to begin each day. White Gold was a heart attack kind of life just a five block walk away. I miss it every now and then even as I am deeply content here. K thought the coffee was good and we loved the vibe, which was very Upper West Side, maybe even New York, in an unpretentious kind of way. It was a neighbourhood kind of place, but the neighbourhood was unique and so very different from Redgate.

There is not a single place to eat at Redgate. There is no town to speak of, and maybe, it is best to think of it as a hamlet, a collection of houses spread through the bush. Six kilometres up the road and a ten minute drive from the coast is the town of Witchcliffe, which has a population of 400 or so. Our mail gets delivered there. It also has a tennis court, Country Women’s Association hall, bush fire brigade, Red Cross op shop, petrol station, candle and crafts store, antique store, bottle O, pie shop, tractor dealer, and, finally, a café called Yardbyrd.

Yardbyrd opened while we were away. We knew it was coming because we visited the owner on the last day of his old café, Little Willy’s, which was in Northbridge, the suburb next to the central business district in Perth where most restaurants, clubs and shops are. Opening Yardbyrd was his seachange, and is a new kind of morning local for us. It has a courtyard with tables and chairs, an indoors with a potbelly stove, and a menu that is straight down the line Australian café – brekky roll, burritos, continental sandwiches, savoury muffin, eggs poached, scrambled, fried. It also has a coffee list to make our New York friends think again about what good coffee is.

It had slipped our minds, but today was Good Friday and we wanted to grab a bite to eat. Against all odds, Yardbyrd was open and, as it so happened, pumping when we arrived mid morning. There was a cross section of down south society there – hippies, hipsters, backpackers; pensioners, tradies, farmers; tourists, salty dogs and hot bods. We got a seat and ordered simply. They were friendly and prompt. If you remember my order at White Gold, you will know I ordered a brekky roll.

The brekky roll satisfies the basic criteria – breakfast meat and an egg. This one differentiates itself on account of the tomato chutney and the handful of fresh baby spinach. The chutney adds some sweetness to the salty bacon, a bit of moisture too, and the spinach a bit of earthy freshness that cuts through the eggy mouthfeel. The bread is dense, somewhere between sourdough and damper, but lavishly buttered and altogether homely.

This breakfast roll is great at what it does best – it tastes like a friendly welcome that knows what good living is. Like being here at Redgate, one feels closer to nature. The spinach makes it greener. It is a cousin to the breakfast rolls in New York, but they only maintain a family resemblance on account of the ingredients, nothing more. They are not siblings let alone twins and both have a place in my heart as the kind of thing I want every now and then.

The space where Yardbyrd is now, used to be a high end, French influenced restaurant called Robbie’s Place. As a kid, I liked that we shared a name. My dad took me there once, just the two of us, and it was the fanciest meal I had enjoyed up until that point of my very short life. It's cooking was different to Yarbyrd, but they share a great vibe. Yardbyrd has that indefinable quality, something we might call feel, something that comes with confidence as well as perspective. It is a place that doesn’t try too hard, but gets on with the job of being a very good local that responds to the needs of the place and its community. I couldn’t be happier to see it arrive and it adds to my fondness for Witchcliffe just up the road from where we like to spend our days, just a minute away from Redgate where we call home.