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.

Loungin' Around

Lounging around?!  What a concept!  The owners (and workers) in the Blue Bird don't have much time,, I'm sorry to say, for sofa surfing.  Wishful thinking however, has led us to convert the front window to what we hope is a comfy lounge.  Customers can kick back and relax with a coffee in one hand and a book in the other.

As you will see from the pictures (or even better, from your last visit), we have recreated everyone's childhood living room with the black and white television the focus of the room, family photos hanging on the wall (my family that is), and handmade cushions.  It is the next stage in turning back the clock on The Blue Bird and while the 'cafe lounge' is a more contemporary innovation, we wanted ours to reflect the past, your past, my past, the comfort of our collective family homes.  We want the Blue Bird Cafe to be all about the comfort of tradition and the familiarity of home.

And just to let you all know, we have not given up on the booths.  It is still the number one question we get asked.  It's begins with the comment, "you've changed the place".  Well yes, we are new people, with new ideas and things do change in life but we have great sympathy for this lovely building so we make our changes with that in the forefront of our minds.  Your question then becomes, "what happened to the booths?"  Let me reassure you that the booths were one of the things that endeared the forlorn cafe to us and inspired us to buy it.  So the answer is...of course we love the booths and intend to put them back.  It has been a long hard process to get the cafe this far and hopefully when the day arrives that we relaunch the lovely Blue Bird booths, it will have been worth the wait.  In the background, unseen, we have spent a lot of time and effort working on them to be safe for people to sit on again.  So please hang in there for as long as necessary because Rome wasn't built in a day but it is still one of the popular destinations in Europe.

That's Amore!

"When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie...that's amore".  Oh it is so true.  These days the cooking smells of fresh dough pizza drift from the Blue Bird's oven and out onto Green Street on a cold winter night.  It is the aroma of heaven if I do say so myself.  Not much compares with the smell of baking bread and as we use fresh bread dough to make our handmade pizzas, the cafe smells like a bakery on the evenings we are cooking pizzas.

We proudly make our own tomato Napoli sauce to top our bases so we know that it is fresh and made with real ingredients to our own recipe.  We make our own meatballs too that nestle on top of the cured meats on our Bavarian pizza.  And our Greek Lamb has been specially prepared for us by the local butcher and marinated to our own tastes in herbs and spices that we think evoke the flavours of Greece.  When our garden is abundant in basil, our Margherita pizza is made with our own fresh basil blended with Australian macadamias into pesto.

We aim to make the best pizzas possible because already, only a couple into our new careers as pizzeria cooks, we recognise that a pizza made with amore really is something very special.  And it shows.  The best pizza makers in Melbourne have made it their lifetime's work.  It's not just a flash in the pan job to them, they make pizzas night after night into their dotage.  They love and live for making pizza and now that we have entered the business, we have come to understand and appreciate a simple pleasure that belies the art of the pizza.  Watching the dough rise, handling it in its soft warm state, is a visceral pleasure.  There is a systematic skill to laying it out on the trays and spreading each with Napoli sauce, toppings and just the right amount of mozzarella to make melted strands of cheese without it being oily.  It is a sheer delight.

So if our customers enjoy our pizzas (and early feedback, not to mention repeat orders indicate that they do), it is because we enjoy making dinner for them.  And hopefully it shows.  After all

...That's Amore!

"So, looks like we have ourselves a reader..."

A line from the comedian Bill Hicks sums up our little joint venture of Blue Bird Cafe and Blue Bird Bookshop.  Readers visiting our town have something to tempt them at The Blue Bird in our range of quality second-hand books.  Having been a librarian for so long (one who was so passionate about encouraging the lifelong love of reading that I started seven book groups) I haven't been able to give up the books.  The original plan was to start a second-hand book shop in Melbourne but when we saw this sad and lonely, lovely Blue Bird, we decided we might be able to combine the traditional with the contemporary business of cafe bookshop.  We knew that it works in Melbourne with BookTalk in Richmond (not to mention many other cities around the world) and we figured that Lockhart needed a bookshop to boost the businesses in town.

There was a bookshop here when we arrived and so we had decided to shelve (ha, ha) our idea, but a couple of months after we started our own project, it closed down and moved elsewhere.  So, we figured, why not..we had the stock and saw no sense in leaving it in storage.  So Blue Bird Books began.  And now here is my pledge to our reading customers.

The books we stock are and always will be...quality books.  This means that they are newly published or perennial classics, in good condition, reasonably priced and hand selected by a trained professional (yes that is me).  The choice on what goes on our shelves comes down to...either I have read it myself and have recommended it to others, have discussed it in a book group or it comes on the high recommendation of a respected customer of mine in one of the libraries I used to work in.  So in other words, I can vouch for it.

So next time you are in Lockhart and The Blue Bird check out our titles.  The prices range from $10 to $4.  Here are a few of our choice picks:

When Colts Ran by Roger McDonald (2012 Miles Franklin Shortlisted)
Mr Pip by Lloyd Jones
Room by Emma Donoghue
There Should Be More Dancing by Rosalie Ham
Indelible Ink by Fiona McGregor
Dear Fatty by Dawn French
House Rules by Jodi Picoult
Father's Day by Tony Birch
The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver
Those Who Came After by Elisabeth Holdsworthy
Everything I Knew by Peter Goldsworthy
....and
Matilda is Missing by Carol Overington

Happy Reading.

Lamingtons and Oyster - Made at The Blue Bird

Although we are still operating with limited kitchen equipment (a mini oven and a two burner portable hotplate), we are proudly making a number of our own food lines in-house at The Blue Bird.  Every morning I make a batch of our own recipe sausage rolls which come out of the oven around 11.00am and are sold out most days by 1.00pm.  Word of mouth has been spreading the news about fresh made sausage rolls (not to mention the smell of cooking pastry drifting down the street) and we have a few weekly regulars coming back for seconds.  You can imagine my surprise when a visitor to town came in asking for one of our famous sausage rolls.  Famous?!  He had had them recommended by someone further down the street I guess.  I can't imagine how else they might be "famous".  World famous in Lockart?  Like L&P which is world famous in New Zealand.  The secret to the sausage rolls?  I guess it is using fresh ingredients like herbs from our own garden.

I also make some sort of sweet treat in the little oven.  Where would I be without it?  An impulse buy has become an indispensable tool already.  Today's sweet was coffee cream cake which came from my old school recipe book. An egg-less cake that never fails. It was originally chocolate but it makes a good coffee cake that is not too sweet.  I made up a silky coffee flavoured cream topping to give it that bit more of a coffee hit.  Other days I have fashioned my own version of the perennial favourite lamingtons.  The look rustic because I don't have the secret technique for coating them in coconut without making a mess but that is how you can tell they were made by hand and not a machine I guess.  Muffins are made here with lots of fruit in the Twoberry Muffins (blueberry and cherry) or Black Forest.  I tried to get fancy with writing a 'B' for Blue Bird in the top of the muffins but by the time they baked it just looked like a gooey squiggle.  Never mind.  At the weekend I often make scones for Devonshire Tea, spicy fruit or plain served with apricot or cherry jam and fresh cream.  Last week I made some old-fashioned cinnamon oysters, clipped from the back of a baking powder packet by my mother in the 1970s.  She tucked it in a recipe book but never got round to trying it out so I had to take up the mantle.

A new friend from The Rock is a keen CWA slice maker of some local repute  She has shared some of her best 'slice' recipes for future cafe use.  She assures me that the jelly slice will walk out the door in winter.  So I made lemon ginger slice (just like nan used to make someone told me when they tried it), and one that was simply called 'slice' made with sultanas and coconut.  I added my own twist of pink strawberry marshmallow topping and called it Marshmallow Chew because it sounded better than just plain 'slice'.  My friend tried my Custard Sponge Kisses sandwiched together with strawberry jam and cream and said it was like an old-fashioned powder puff, just like her mum made. Don't give away my secret recipes, she told me.  I laughed and said that one day, when we are famous, I might publish The Blue Bird Cafe, Lockhart's recipe book as a souvenir piece.

You never know which sweet treat will be under the glass dome at The Blue Bird as I try out new recipes.

Antiques and Trucks

The other week Lockhart celebrated a local festival, two events in one day.  Saturday 9th March was the Antiques Under the Verandahs and Historic Truck and Commercial Vehicles Show Day.  We worked like Trojans all night to make The Blue Bird look its best yet by opening up two thirds of the cafe and tripling the seating area.  Roger and I finally dragged ourselves off to bed at 1.30am only to have to wake up to the alarm which was set to 6.00am for an early start to the day.

We opened the doors at 7.00am and soon after, the first of the stallholders at the antique market stalls lining the street under the verandahs, came in for coffee.  From that moment until 2.00pm Roger did not raise his barista's head from the coffee machine while I served scones, jam and cream, pies, sausage rolls and a couple of old-fashioned favourite sandwich combinations, egg and lettuce and salmon, cucumber and cream cheese.  A couple of local girls were on hand to help us out for the day and I am very grateful they were.  There were a few organisational things we will get better at over time as we do more and more festivals like this one and Spirit of the Land but I think all up, we did pretty well and I hope that the visitors on the day appreciated having The Blue Bird open and trading again.  And by the next Spirit of the Land we will be old hats as we will have last year's festival under our belts and know what to expect.  It seemed appropriate though that we work as hard as we did before the Antiques day to get The Blue Bird looking as good as we could so that the visitors who have been used to coming to the iconic cafe would be able to get a glimpse of its future potential (just as we did when we peered through the window about this time last year).

The renovations have taken a lot longer than we anticipated (and than the town would have liked) but my answer these days to the question of "when will you be properly open", is: "we are open...come and see."  We are working hard to re-establish a business that was closed for a year before we saw it.  We fell in love with and bought a building with a lot of history and a great deal of potential underneath its sad state of disrepair.  We did not by an operating business and so it is our efforts that have jump-started it to this point.  And we bring to The Blue Bird Cafe our take on both its past and its future.  We are not just reviving the tradition but we are injecting the practises of 2013 and starting a few traditions of our own.  The Blue Bird has survived 110 years by moving with the times and still is.

So the answer to the more pertinent question about when we will be able to provide evening meals to the town of Lockhart would be: "in good time".  Things done well do take time and with just two of us, Roger on the renovations and the coffee and me on the food, we are striving to do this well.  But we also have ourselves to look after as well as The Blue Bird and if we were to do things with any more urgency than we already are, it would not be good for us.  So be patient, we are getting there and keep looking in to see how far we have come.  There is always something new these days at The Blue Bird Cafe.

What's New?

We have reached the stage with the renovations where we are open for service 6 days a week but The Blue Bird Cafe is still a work in progress and we cannot as yet offer a full menu.  We now have our temporary menu posted on our new menu page...check it out.  It will grow in time and there will be weekend specials as we try out new menu options before they make it permanently to the menu.