The Press Shop — Restaurant in Bowral

Where café meets craft The Press Club is a Bespoke letterpress shop and integrated café in the stunning setting of Bowral in the Southern Highlands. Locally owned, they source and prepare quality food and focus on using small farmers, producers and local supplies and organic food in order to best highlight what the Southern Highlands region has to offer. With fruits and vegetables from Moonacres farm, Piccolo Farm, Highlands organics, Brillig Farm, Living Earth Farm Truffles from Robertson truffles, olive oil from white chapel grove, mushrooms from Li-Sun, meats from maugers and Robertson village butchery, eggs from Taulca Park, honey from the Honey Collector, this café really shows respect to their local area. Head chef Nathan West has put together a delightful menu using these fine ingredients, and the meals tasted so fresh and were absolutely beautifully presented on the plate. Lunch is served from 12 – 3. As we were in a group, we were able to sample a few of the menu items. We would describe this as simple food, done in a very elegant way, showcasing the skills and vision of an inspired chef.

The Waffles were served at a nice lunch size, not overbearing like many cafés these days. Topped with a refreshing coconut sorbet, peaches, mint and a white chocolate crumble. This dish is vegan and dairy free. The local greens frittata was laid on the plate atop a goats curd and decorated with herbs and lovely thin slices of potato crisp. The potato gnocchi was incredible. Served with new season tomatoes, roast onion puree, vino cotto and herbs, this dish is perfect for everyone, including vegetarian and vegan diners. Something the males of your group will love (as well as anyone else) is the Taluca Pork free range Cuban Sandwich with pickles. Fresh bread, great meat and served cut in half with cheese and a side of cucumber and herbs. There’s also a roasted carrot dish, zucchini salad, beef brisket sandwich, eggs benedict and even a kiddies menu. I’m presuming this menu would change seasonally. Drinks wise, the coffee was great too. Speciality coffee, using beans from Cultivar, who source these from Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Costa Rica. You can have a regular milk based coffee, filter coffee, or a flavoured one like turmeric, matcha, velvet (beetrrot) or a hot choc. Organic teas, wild-grown herbal teas, house made iced tea, kobmucha and milkshakes are also on the menu. At the back of the café is a beautiful letter press shop selling handcrafted papers, cards and other lovely gifts. You can also see the letterpress machines and can understand the work that goes into making products of this quality in the old fashioned way. It’s lovely to see them preserving this century old art form. Come for a few meals, coffee and leave with a satisfied belly and a few...

So today for a change of pace from our regular Moss Vale Cafe we decided to stop in and have breakfast at the Press Shop in Bowral. It had been a while since we had been there, the Cafe looks good since the upgrade. We grabbed a table and one of the waitresses dropped off some still water and glasses. The glasses were chilled but the glass carafe the water was in was actually warm as the carafe must have just come out of the dishwasher.????.rockie mistake or just lazy? Anyway we passed on drinking the warm water. So we ordered coffee and our breakfast, two Eggs Benidict with smoked salmon. The coffees came and were enjoyable which I knew they should be as it's the same beans our regular Cafe in Moss Vale uses. Ok, our meals arrived!. At first glance all looked good as Eggs Benedict does with its colours and textures. But then the discovery occurred. Instead of 2-3 nice thin slices of smoked salmon we found basically the whole cryovac packet on each dish hidden under the eggs and hollandaise sauce. Wow! What an absolute waste of smoked salmon. You couldn't, even if you could eat it all. Let alone a third of it there was just so much. It was off putting and a pain to have to pick through it and select a few slices to eat. To me it just shows a whole lack of respect to the business and laziness. Especially when things are tough and margins small. I took photos of both plates showing the excess. Unfortunately I couldn't take a photo of the bad taste the whole experience put in our mouths. We were going tell the slightly older woman in-charge at the counter but her lack of conviction and attitude told us not to bother. We definitely won't be back. Happy to send the photos if someone gets back to me after...

To start off, this cafe is awesome because of the atmosphere, great food and coffee! PROS: Food: i got a big breakfast and my partner got pancakes, both were absolutely delicious and plated really well. Coffee/drinks: coffee tasted great and mg partner had a chai which she said was better than average. Atmosphere: cafe is super bright and not overly loud, tables arent packed on top of each other and you can move around easily! CONS: Food: super expensive, found some egg shells and a stray eyelash but honestly Im not the person who really cares but others do. I just pulled them out. Service: We got given water glasses that were dirty and asked for fresh glasses which never came. My partner had to go up and ask for some after our food arrived because the waitresses appeared to be ignoring her. Food came before coffee which im not a fan of and at no point did anyone ask how the food was or maybe this review about the food may not have happened. Atmosphere: when we arrived there were less than 6 people inside also waiting for a table, we werent in peoples way and were asked to all stand outside which was quite cold to wait for tables that we could see were clearly available and clean to which we ended up sitting at anyway.

Overall: id definitely come back for the food on a special occasion but the service was a bit of a let down which i hope will be improved upon next time. Wouldnt say its worth the hype which ironically enough was what other locals were saying to people while waiting in...