19th August 2019 - 2:30 pm
'Just Fine Food, the home of Sorrento's Famous Vanilla Slice' so says their Facebook page is very old school, and kinda in a good way.
The chairs are bentwood and a bit too light.
The food options are pretty minimal, a couple of cakes, a few savoury slices and one or two other things.
But you're not really going here for anything other than the vanilla slice.
Just Fine Food outdoor seating area.
I would make a terrible food blogger because I almost never remember to take a photo of the food I'm eating. I'm more interested in actually eating the food. So I have no photos of the vanilla slice itself.
Just Fine Foods' google listing has plenty of nice photos of the vanilla slice taken in the sunshine or in perfectly balanced / edited light.
I wasn't sat in the sunshine, because it was intermittently being sunny and rainy at the same time.
The vanilla slice had wonderfully crisp pastry, a dense, creamy interior, some sort of jam on the base and the bottom remained firm enough to cut with the spoon, having not gone very soggy from the weight of the slice sitting on top of it.
The slice was also quite large, flat dimensions around a portable external hard drive – about 10 cm x 8 cm and probably 6-8 cm high. It was substantial, but not overwhelming.
It had a lot of icing sugar on top and more was dusted around it. A little too much in places for me, so I scraped that off.
Large teapot filled with searingly hot water.
Old school wise, this is the first cafe I've been to in a while that their tea options is an old school stainless steel tea pot with leaf tea. Most cafes try to do something fancy with smaller tea pots (my associate an I were both having the same tea so the pot was large). The cups were not very big. But there was definitely enough for several cups of tea.
The milk jug was also stainless steel and quite a large amount of milk in it even if you're having your tea quite milky.
Other notable things, the spoon provided to eat the vanilla slice was a teaspoon of the same design as that with the tea. Again something a lot of other cafes don't do, they seem to want to have a huge range of cutlery and plates.
Sugar canister.
The sugar is white for your hot drinks is white and there are no other options, and it's in a canister on the tables not packets of sugar like in a lot of cafes.
These plates had obviously seen some use and wear, the same with the cutlery.
There were no napkins on the tables, there were outside, but inside they were by the counter. I can understand why, being in a tourist destination they're likely to see a lot of use for things not food related use. It probably all adds up.
The cafe itself is less than inviting if you like modern cafes, the ceiling is very high, the tables and seating hasn't been updated in a long while.
But it doesn't need to have been, this is practically a single item destination cafe, you're not going there for anything other than their vanilla slice.
There appears to be nine other cafes along Ocean Beach Road where Just Fine Foods is. There are likely better fully featured options if that's what you're looking for. But for a really good vanilla slice, then this is the place to go.
In adding the links out to the google listing and adding photos I was looking through the search results for 'Sorrento vanilla slice' and discovered Just Fine Food have a website, which is not linked on their google listing. The site shows off none of its old schoolness. It's a fairly, not generic, but recognisably 'cafe website' style of site. A quick look through the page source of the website reveals it's using woocommerce.
None of the photos appear to have been taken in the cafe, or if they were they were taken in a black light box, the exception is one photo; a top down shot of a vanilla slice on a wooden table this is probably taken outside.
The menu on the website does show that there's more on offer than what I first thought walking in there.
Additionally the About Us page is very lacking in information. From the reviews on google it's enough to infer that the business itself has changed hands at least once, though the recipe and the person making it has not. I couldn't find a source for this aside from another blog, but I guess this isn't something you go out of your way to publicise.