public.

The life of a graduate seeking employment can be depressing sometimes.  But here's the silver lining - midweek birthday brunches! No need to wait for the weekend and join the queues.  Instead my friends and I celebrated one of their birthdays at PUBLIC, a fairly unmissable establishment on Franklin Street just opposite the Victoria Square park.  It's generally bustling with suits and office ladies around the early morning coffee and morning tea times and lunchtimes are quite popular too.

The breakfast menu is served only up till 11 am, and we made it with 5 minutes to spare.  There are quite a lot of options for breakfast including a delicious sounding blue swimmer crab omelette and fig & walnut bread, plus the regular eggs-as-you-like with bread and additional toppings.  The lunch/dinner menu is also fairly extensive and they do a special Friday night dinner menu each week.

Spicy Tomato Eggs: $17.50

Look at those yolks!  My order: perfectly poached eggs in a spicy tomato sauce with chorizo and haloumi cubes.  The chargrilled home-made bread were slightly buttered and made for great dipping sticks, toasted on the outside and meltingly soft on the inside.  I would have liked one more to soak up the rest of my sauce, which was just the right mix of spicy and tomato.  The chorizo and haloumi pieces were a bit small and engulfed by the sauce, although mixing the eggs in made the sauce thicker and easier to eat.

Ricotta Pancakes: $15.50

A stack of three fluffy and well-syruped pancakes were topped with a melting medallion of cinnamon butter.  Only the top pancake was filled with ricotta; the bottom two were pure batter.  The caramelised apples lifted the sweetness up by a lot and the caramel sauce was intense.

Eggs on Toast with Chorizo & Smashed Avocado: $19.50

The original template is eggs on toast, but my friend added in the chorizo and smashed avocado.  She found the chorizo delicious but thought that the smashed avocado was slightly overpowered by lemon juice and chives.  The masterpiece, however, was definitely the scrambled eggs. So perfectly scrambled!  So deliciously yellow and creamy!  So meltingly soft! There must be an egg master at work in these kitchens because these eggs (and mine) were amazing.

Hot Chocolate: $4.00

Nothing too extraordinary about the chocolate.  I do commend the barista's attempt at latte art though.

Great food and a lively atmosphere make Public another place to add to my ever-growing 'must come back' places.  The service was pretty standard although I have to say the guy waiters were much friendlier than the girls.  A major tick was awarded by my friends for their bathroom having 'amazing' handsoap and hand lotion in the toilets.  So if pretty toilets and good food are your thing, you should go by and have a try.