Get Behind Me Gluten

• Good for coeliacs
• Expensive
• A convenient stop

This winter the family headed to the snow during the school holidays with plans to visit Perisher to ski and drink schnapps!

On our way, we stopped to stretch our legs in Cooma and grabbed some lunch at The Lott café, a spot at the far end of the main street where the Monaro Highway becomes the Snowy Mountains Highway.

We managed to get a park directly opposite the café and the four of us trudged over the road, dodging the traffic, and entered. The café looks really nice. It’s decorated in white with lots of wooden hues. The counter, floors and tables were all wooden and there were some big fake trees dotted around. There were large corner windows letting in plenty of sunlight and the whole space was light and airy. It was a lovely spot although I was a bit cold in there. 

We arrived around 11:30 and were shown to a table. The staff member was alright, efficient but not particularly chipper.  We sat down at the table and the place quickly filled up as we scanned the menu. The hardcopy of the menu does not include allergy information, however the online menu included gluten free markings. When the wait staff came over to take our orders I did the usual coeliac explanation and she seemed to take this in her stride, saying she’d notify the kitchen. 

We ordered two skim flat whites with one decaf, two babychinos, a chicken shawarma (not gluten free), and gingerbread pancakes (also not gluten free) for Michael and the girls to share, and the Low Carb – a vegetable stack with bacon and eggs for me. The coffee came out quickly and was nice – my decaf was creamy and I wished I’d ordered the larger size, and Michael was happy with his coffee too. 

The food came out after a short wait – by this time almost all the tables were full but I don’t feel we waited a long time for the food to arrive. The chicken shawarma was pretty big but Michael was unimpressed. It was a slightly fancy chicken wrap, but the chicken was all at one end and it felt like they’d tried a bit too hard to make it “gourmet” by adding dried cherries to the salad. It had been heated and looked a bit overdone. 

The (gluteny) pancakes were quite nice. They had been stacked upon each other with four pancakes and piled with stewed rhubarb, candied pistachios and vanilla custard. The problem with this was that the top pancake was soggy with sauce while the other pancakes had none. The texture of the pancakes (excluding the soggy top one) was good though, fluffy with a good gingerbread flavour, and the rhubarb sauce was tart. It would’ve benefitted from something creamy – like having the custard on the side, or a scoop of mascarpone – to cut through the rhubarb and a bit more thought in the construction.

The Low Carb looked really nice when it came out. It contained roasted vegetables which I think was sweet potato, silverbeet, and crispy bacon stacked on smashed avocado with two poached eggs on top, and hollandaise sauce and chimichurri artfully splodged on the plate! The eggs and bacon were perfectly cooked, the eggs had lovely rich runny yolks and the bacon had some extra crunchy pieces, almost like jerky, although it was not as salty as I expected. The roasted vegetables were a bit weak as it was only sweet potato (or maybe pumpkin – it was hard to tell!) and the silverbeet, although well cooked, is a naturally tough green to chew. The avocado oozed into the hollandaise and chimichurri a bit but was tasty. The hollandaise sauce was a bit disappointing. It was very thin, almost watery, and it lacked the creaminess I associated with that type of sauce. The chimichurri was ok, obviously very oily but you could taste the parsley. I couldn’t really taste any garlic while I was eating it but afterwards I had dragon breath! It wasn’t a bad dish but it felt like it was trying a bit too hard. 

Once we’d finished eating, I paid the bill – $70.50. This was a bit steep for me. The Low Carb was $22 and wasn’t really worth that much money. It was coeliac safe food that was ok but it really felt that the Lott Café was aiming higher than it could deliver.