Shillinglaw Cafe — Restaurant in Melbourne

This is THE place to come if you want something different to mainstream cafes that say they cater for kids. Welcome to Shillinglaw located off Main Road in Eltham. This old homestead built around the 1850’s was fortunately salvaged when a demolition order was impending and converted to the sweetest cafe / restaurant. Today it is beautifully decorated with an eclectic range of well chosen homewares that makes me think it’s been staged Australian Country Style magazine. You walk through the main door to a small reception to the left and a very small kitchen to the right. How they pump out so many great meals is a testament to the talents of the chefs. Keep walking up the stairs to a lovely indoor dining area which doubles as function room. Keep walking through this area to a covered outdoor dining area that opens up to another eating area that is bathed in the dappled light of an oak (?) tree. Here is where the magic happens. The ground is covered with fake turf so come sun or rain it’s an all season mudless play area. The sandpit is huge with plenty of space for lots of kids. Seating is comfortable and matches the theme of the decor and also won’t blow away with a gust of wind. Menu is simple but healthy fare. My daughter had scone, jam and cream. I had packed eggs on sour dough with a side serve of bacon and haloumi. The chair latte was a nice loose leaf blend and served in the cutest jug. Service was excellent and faultless. Nothing was too much trouble and the food took about 15 minutes from order to table. Good parking out the front. Kid friendly. Not sure if it’s wheelchair friendly because of the stairs but there may be access from the rear. Takeaway coffee and cakes available. Functions can be booked so make Enquiries via the website. Big brownie points - your fur babies are...

My family and I used to be semi-regulars at Shillinglaw, but after a previous bad experience (low effort, low quality food for a sit down breakfast) had been avoiding going there. Anyway, I was in the area with my 5 year old son on a Sunday morning and the cafe we normally go to (Teapot) was closed, so we decided to drop in to Shillinglaw for a bowl of wedges for morning tea. After all, I thought to myself, it's just a bowl of wedges - what could possibly go wrong?

We walk in, and without looking at the menu, I order wedges. The girl takes the order, asks me if I'd like tomato sauce, I say no, we'd like sour cream and sweet chili sauce. We go outside, and are seated. "Would you like to order anything?" - "no, we've just got wedges coming, that's all we need thanks". "Ok, no worries". A few minutes later, another girl comes out and says sorry, they don't have sour cream. Which I found strange, but ok - I say tomato sauce will be fine. A bit later, out comes a bowl of chips. I tell her that we didn't order chips, we ordered wedges. "Oh... we don't actually do wedges.". I blink, and after a puzzled moment, ask why did they take an order for wedges if they don't do wedges, to which the answer was of course "I don't know, sorry". Decided to just take the L and accept the chips. They were freezer fries, and were MASSIVELY over-salted to the point of almost being inedible. No apologies or even a "thank you" when we left.

The absolute simplest of orders and they somehow managed to completely screw it up.

This place actually used to be good. What the...

The food is good and fairly reasonably priced. Great chips. Lot's of drinks to choose from and it's even licenced in case you wanted something stronger.

The staff are generally pretty friendly but there is a serious training issue or something going on because there are often problems. Food is often VERY slow to arrive, even when they don't seem particularly busy and even if you've only ordered a muffin or toast. Food frequently fails arrive at all (about 1 in 3 times, someone at my table has not received something). This is obviously a real problem and something isn't working right because it happens far too often. There's a sign that says 'Please wait to be seated', but you can stand there for ages with staff buzzing around past you without being acknowledged (I think they should remove the sign or train the staff to seat you). I imagine these factors would greatly limit the popularly of the place if it wasn't for the play area. But that should be no excuse not to work on having good service.

The kitchen closes at 2pm on weekdays and the whole cafe closes at 3pm (add an hour for both on weekends). This seems a little early to me. What about all those mums who go for a coffee with the little ones before picking the big ones up from school? Plus I would have thought people would still like to eat after 2pm. But the biggest problem is that they often close early, meaning that I've showed up at 1:45 and they won't serve food. Or at 2:30 and they are done serving drinks. I won't risk going anymore in case they...