i zoomed past slowpoke back in the depth of wintertime, but i was on my way to lunch further up brunswick street and couldn’t do much more than peep into the window and take note of the long room lined in rough hewn timber. it was brightly lit and airy, and there was a glass case of baked goods midway down. fitzroy-cute, rather than mountain-manly. i made a mental note to return. newly into spring — the first day of school holidays — after a jaunt through the carlton gardens playground, the kid was hungry for eggs. so we strolled up gertrude — coming distracted and somewhat unstuck only by the papier mache skulls at amor y locura — and rounded the corner. “i think we can get eggs here,” i told maeve as we stood on the threshold. “let’s go here,” she said.

we perched ourselves at the counter fronting the window, overlooking an open bowl of sugar, an open cup of pink salt, and a host of bicycles chained up outside. we ordered a pot of chai and watched the trendy kids wander down the road with too-big hair and too-small jeans.

from the tidy chalkboard menu, the kid picked the boiled eggs with toast soldiers, just about as eggy as you can get. they arrived, twins in matching cups, with a platoon of very liberally buttered sourdough fingers. after her tentative attempts, i cracked the top of the first egg sharply, and elicited a horrified gasp from the kid: a massacre! but once she’d picked away enough of the shell with her itchy little fingers, the translucent white came into view, and the googy yolk poured forth, and all was forgiven.

i had a hard time choosing — from the short and sweet menu of simple sandwiches and smashed avocado, everything appealed — but eventually settled on the lentil soup. oh my. the veritable swamp of light and colour puddled at the bottom of a large bowl was not what i was expecting, but gee, it was good. far from a gluggy mass of pureed lentils, this was a rich brothy thing with clearly identifiable pulses. the fresh tomatoes and baby spinach leaves brightened up a long slow chilli burn. the scattering of chilli flakes, of course, added to it. i ate it all, mopped up the dredges with bread. the smear of softened butter was most welcome.

the amazing expanding powers of lentil soup meant it was impossible right then to consider the tiny slivers of caramel slice and other homemade fancies from the cake counter, but that was ok. our feet were itching to get back to the street. it’s a world of fun and toys and vintage kokeshi dolls and shoo-fly buns out there in fitzroy, and it was ours for the taking.