one saturday after chinese class, i let the kid choose: lunch at milkwood, or CERES. we’d been to the CERES cafe once before, some months ago, and though the food was quite tasty, i remember it being also quite pricey (as befitting its organic pedigree), and it took a long, loooong time getting to the table. what the kid remembered was that the CERES cafe sat next to a playground. not a regular playground, by any means, none of that ubiquitous modern day kidsafe climbing structures with soft plastic bumpers wrapped around metal tubes in primary hues. oh no.

set amongst the enormous roaming chickens, the vegetable plots, the nursery, the produce market and a yurt display, the CERES playground is organic as its agricultural practice. there’s a treehouse seemingly held together by lengths of thin wire and old bicycle tyres, and there is a massive dinosaur-gourd-shaped thing with spikes and holes that kids can climb on and into, and there is a generous sandpit, and that’s about it.

lunch before playground, i insisted, so we ordered at the counter, and we sat and waited. a short while later, the kid’s iced tea arrived. she lost interest after a couple of sips — it was barely sweetened, certainly nothing like the sugar water you get when buying bottled ice tea — and i gladly inherited it. it was perfectly refreshing, tinged with mint.

and then for the longest time, it was just us and the glass of tea. the cafe is a large, rambling space, with outdoor seating and indoor seating and in-between, undercover seating, but even so, it shouldn’t take this long, should it? upwards of half an hour? just as we began to slump low in our seats, the food came.

i had the tart of the day. it had sounded nice on the blackboard: silverbeet and zucchini tart, and it was just delicious in real life. served warm, it was a golden eggy thing packed with silverbeet (i couldn’t really detect the zucchini), in a light and crusty pastry. the accompanying salad was a textural treat with a variety of toasted seeds scattered through the perfectly dressed leaves.

the kid requested a reprise of the french toast which her dad had had on our first visit, but on her own only managed one of the three enormous slabs of pillowy, syrup-drizzled bread on the plate. just as well i hadn’t sprung for the extra bacon — from memory, close to six dollars for a couple modest slices of happy pig.

and then i sat in the sunny shade for a little bit, digesting, while the kid went off to the playground. the last time we were there, she’d been involved in an altercation with another kid in the big clay dinogourd. the other child — a slightly younger girl — had approached maeve and, unprovoked, started hitting her repeatedly. when maeve eventually retaliated, the other mother, who’d been quietly observing, shot us poison glances and complained, because “well, your daughter didn’t have to hit her back.”

this time, maevis was warned off the treehouse by a boy, who said, “only people who are our friends can come up.” (moments earlier, said boy had been involved in a raucous and ill-humoured to-and-fro with said friends about who got to play with a stick or stone or tyre or something. i forget. clearly his definition of “friends” needs… definition.)

sigh. urban hippies and their free range parenting eh? the kids may eat organic and dress defiantly and ethically second-hand, but gee some of them are turning out to be snotty little turds.

so, o em gee, i finally made it to hellenic republic. you know how it is, you move to a suburb and you think that maybe the place on the next big street might be your local, the substitute for the big trip to press club you hadn’t yet managed to wrangle? but then it turns out the next big street is just too many small streets away, and the months go by, and the little glimmer on the corner becomes the taunty glimmer in the corner of your eye as the tram trundles past. well. the boy’s parents were in town the other weekend, and i seized my chance. two weeks ahead, i emailed the restaurant wondering if perchance there was a spot for sunday luncheon open. sometime between noon and 1.30 would be good, i’d said. they wrote back fairly swiftly with an offer: 2.15, and bear in mind the restaurant closes at 4. i gladly accepted.

and so it was that we found ourselves sitting at a handsome wooden table, set so closely to the next that i could’ve reached out and helped myself to their food. i couldn’t tell which was louder: the lunchtime crush or the accompanying soundtrack of superloud eurodisco. i was excited, but the combination of noise, and hard surfaces, and hunger, and the awful knowledge that we would not be able to have one of everything off the menu was making me twitchy.

but then the food arrived. first, a loaf of bread, except about the size of a generous roll. it was delicious, crusty on the outside, soft and warm on the inside. it was $6. the smoked octopus came next, a salad of delicate slices in a tart dressing, with a tangle of caper leaves. it was delicious too, a tiny serve in a dish resembling a small ashtray, and $22. before we had even slurped it all up, we boldly ordered another one.

the food wasn’t all tiny, thankfully. we soon settled into a generous bowl of cypriot grain salad — a textural marvel in freekah, almonds, pinenuts, capers… all kinds of crunchy in one spoon, and then topped with a a dollop of thick yoghurt and a sprinkling of glistening pomegranate seeds. we couldn’t get enough of the wedge of fried cheese draped in syrupy figs, the best kind of sweet-salty combination.

by this stage, the mains had started to arrive. we’d solved the bread situation with a basket of pita, but mother-of-boy saw the golden chips headed for the next table, and had to get the kid us a bowl for ourselves. oh my word, if all chips could be like this:

and so it went. we had lamb off the spit, and baked eggplant, and a seafood casserole which looked like all the bounty of the ocean with a surprise buried treasure of rissoni, yarrs. we ate with gusto, partly because of the later-than-usual lunchtime, but mainly because everything tasted wonderful. nothing was left long enough for a photo to be taken. see the braised seafood? that was but a minute after it hit the table, and already half depleted.

back in december, we stumbled into a pastryshop in the small town of kastraki, in greece. i’d bought a tub of ekmek, essentially a trifley little thing topped with half a maraschino cherry — honey-soaked kataifi down below, whipped cream up above, and some custard in the middle. i’d bought it for me, but then once everyone had had a taste back in our room at the foot of the mountains, i found myself sharing three ways. months later, the kid — shameless masterchef groupie that she is — had been excited to learn that we’d be going to george’s restaurant, but she was most deliriously looking forward to ekmek.

amazingly, 20 minutes to closing, there was still room for dessert. the ekmek was brought to the table, and it was just beautiful. the pastry was crisp and fresh, constructed in a fat tube with a vein of smooth white custard. there were tart syrupy cherries and a fat scoop of mastic ice cream. it was a veritable wonderland of flavours and textures, and therein lay the cruel, tragic irony: it proved to be too fancy and refined an ekmek for the kid. the pastry was too shattery, and the custard too custardy (the kid does not like custard), and the ice cream had a weird tinge… of course i was more than happy to eat her share.

i still had to fight her for the cherries though.