CERES Café

It isn’t easy being green – unless you eat at CERES

First published on 22 Nov 2010. Updated on 21 Dec 2011.

If you’re one earth-savvy individual, congratulations! At CERES café, you can eat guilt-free with your fellow planeteers, and sit under the gumtrees wearing your hemp fisherman’s pants with pride. If, however, you’re a four-minute-plus-shower-taking-eco-criminal, go anyway, and rub out your carbon footprint with an organic muffin.

Part of the Community Environmental Park and managed by David Major, this café is a large-scale science project for grown-ups and it gets a gold star.

Fear not: nobody will shove a political agenda into your baguette, but they will slug you a sandwich packing serious vegetable matter that has travelled all of 20 metres from the garden to your plate. Head chef Lydia MacPartlon’s menu proves that you can use 80 per cent organic produce and have more on offer than alfalfa and a potato. Eggs come every which way, and you can even get your free-range bacon on (extra gold star), but with the bounteous garden at hand, meat-free options are the way to go.

Indonesian eggs ($14.80), organic and fried, served on rice with a chilli sambal, soy, peanuts and coriander, have a spicy hit that will wake you up faster than an EpiPen, and vegan or not, try the slow-cooked baked beans ($9). The dish is like a spicy vegetarian cassoulet, and shows that life can be just dandy sans sausage.

Beetroot and chilli relish, tahini-maple spread and flourishes of freshly picked herbs also really give staples a facelift. Servings are generous, but with so much wholesomeness buzzing about the mosaic tables, you can stuff your face and still feel like you’ve been detoxing.

Understandably, the tranquillity can become too much for some, so they’ve started stocking Mountain Goat ales and a range of organic wines. We approve, but if you want a more moderate fix, bean worshippers Coffee Supreme supply their locally roasted organic best here, and the skilled baristas morph it into sweet, crema-coated ambrosia.

Kicking goals for Captain Planet, CERES has a lot of good karma – not to mention customers pedaling their way.