Gluten Free Lockhart

Do you eat gluten-free?  The Blue Bird Cafe has been offering our customers gluten-free options for a while now in our own handmade pizza bases and sandwiches.  The response we have has inspired us to expand our menu for those on special diets.  That means that we need you to help us create fantastic and tempting dishes.  We are inviting the gluten-free, dairy-free and diabetic communities to contribute your suggestion or better still a recipe that you enjoy and want us to make.  Through the Blue Bird you can share your favourite dish with other foodies in the same boat as you.  Your ideas can help make Lockhart a destination for gluten-free, diabetes and dairy-free lovers of good, fresh food.

If you have a suggestion or a recipe to contribute, please send it to: bluebirdlockhart@gmail.com.  We would love to hear from you.

NEWS FLASH!!!
We now make our own Gluten-Free bread and it has already been given the thumbs up by customers.  We are happy to make you a fresh take-home loaf on request (please give 24 hours notice as we are not making large quantities at this stage).  So come in and try one of our sandwiches made with our own bread.

From the Cafe With Love

When we bought the cafe a year ago we made contact with Peter and Barbara Veneris to learn more about The Blue Bird.  They invited us to afternoon tea and we spent a few hours picking their brains to hear stories about the cafe during their long reign.  I remember Peter's first words to me on the telephone when I introduced myself.  "Oh, we have been so worried about what would happen to the cafe", he told me.  I set his mind at rest that we had nothing but the best intentions to restore and revive The Blue Bird and continue the tradition that the Veneris and the Matis families had begun all those years ago.

That long afternoon tea turned into the first of many opportunities that Peter had for reverie about the cafe.  Once we took possession and started work on the building repairs, he began popping down to the shop whenever he remembered something important he wanted to tell us..about the original colour scheme, the dates of the alterations, the names of tradesmen he had forgotten, the old menu.  At first I was apprehensive when members of the family arrived to take a look around.  The cafe had been closed for so long and of course the first thing that we did was pull much of it apart before beginning to restore and reassemble it.  I was concerned that they might be distraught over the state of the building but as they arrived over the next few months we showed them around.  It was lovely that they saw beyond the state of disarray.  They remembered instead when they were children growing up here and later, adults returning after time away.  They instantly understood us in a way that others may not yet.  We are not from Lockhart and we did not grow up, as others did, at 'The Cafe', but we felt an instant rapport with the place from our first encounter and we have its best interests at heart.  The memories of the Veneris and Matis families are helping us piece together a jigsaw of history before our time.  It is a story that we are keen to know more about. 

Peter was an inspiration to us.  He came down to see us when he was able and was never distressed by the shambles of the reconstruction work.  He had already seen so many changes to the shop over the years.  Changes he and his brother had made, repairs, re-modelling, adaptations to keep the business alive in times of adversity and competition.  None of what we were doing phased him.  He offered us his full support.

When we opened the doors Peter and Barbara came down to the cafe as customers rather than workers.  We have had to work on getting our coffee just right for Barbara's tastes and Peter suggested that we get her to show us her technique.  Whenever he visited, we noticed that Peter was still keenly aware of the needs of the customers around him.  A habit not easily forgotten.  His eyes twinkled when the children came in for their lollies, watching with fondness the process of them counting out their small fortune and working out what they could get for their money.  One lolly from this jar, one from that one.  High finance.  He graciously shouted friends a cuppa and a piece of cake while he chatted on about the old days and he enjoyed a milkshake like he was a kid again.

Last week Peter passed away.  We were honoured to have met him and extremely grateful that we got the chance to share the cafe with him, open again for business, before he went.  We are indebted to have heard some of his stories first hand and have done our best to record them.

A tribute to Peter and Jack and the Veneris families is currently on display at the cafe.

Photograph courtesy of the National Museum of Australia exhibition "Selling an American Dream: Australia's Greek Cafe"
http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/selling_an_american_dream_australias_greek_cafe/the_exhibition

One Year On...

Here we are at our second Spirit of the Land Festival.  We moved to Lockhart just three days before the 2012 festival and set ourselves up with scoop ice creams and slushies outside the shop.  This year's festival came around and we concluded that despite having participated last year, we still had no idea what to expect this time round.

Of course that is because this time, the cafe is open for business.  As we planned for this year's festival we reflected on how far we have come in that one year.  In December, financial necessity prompted us to open the front door with a drinks fridge and an ice cream freezer parked in the entrance.  That confused people a bit, not being able to get beyond the front door I mean, but it meant that we had a small income to keep us going while we painted and hammered and worked hard inside.

At the end of January, we started with a small menu of toasted sandwiches and seating just in the front window along the bar side of the shop.  Everything else was still barricaded off, a work in progress.  In March, we made a push to get more of the cafe ready to go on show.  We wanted to accommodate more people at the Antiques Under the Verandah weekend.  By that point we had about a third of the cafe open for seating.

Over the long, hard, slow crawl of winter, surviving our first year in business, we launched the Blue Bird Bookshop side of operations and the Blue Bird Pizzas.  The entrepreneurial spirit saw us through the winter months and prepared us for the spring season.

So now we have again made a concerted effort to, this time, open the restored milk bar for Spirit of the Land.  As a result we are pleased to have two thirds of the cafe open to customers.  At this year's Spirit festival we were able to use the bar as a milk bar again serving ice cream, milkshakes, fresh juice, spiders and coffee from behind the counter.  A new internal freezer has meant that we can use the ice cream/milk tubs as they were intended.  It has been a while since the bar has worked and as far as we know we are one of only a handful (if not the only) working milk bars left in Australia.  It is hard to imagine that once upon a time there was one in every town and now the genuine thing is an almost extinct breed.  But it was marvelous to step back in time and be a real Greek-Australian cafe again.  My huge thanks to all the helpers we had over the big weekend.  It was the teamwork, their enthusiasm and their tremendous efforts that made the weekend such an easy success and I know that they all enjoyed themselves immensely as I hope the visitors did.

So now we are recovering and settling in to the new set up, fine tuning our routine in the new look cafe.  We are looking forward to creating a new menu for summer.  So on that note, meet you at the Cafe for coffee and an ice cream...see you there soon.