The Farm Cafe

'OINK, oink", "moo", "cluck, cluck, cluck". It's hard to eat when it sounds like your breakfast is talking back to you.

In fact, for many, visiting the Collingwood Children Farm's cafe could be a fast track to vegetarianism.

And where better for this to take place than on my third-favourite Victorian peninsula, the Collingwood one that juts into the narrowing Yarra; a bucolic haven in the middle of urban dross.

Entering the farm, you walk past allotments and trees laden with figs and olives. Then next along, pens of plump chooks and a blackboard inviting you to visit Moira and her five new cute piglets. You'll stroll up to a sail-shaded counter outside the weatherboard shed that houses the Farm Cafe's kitchen, pick up a menu, order a decent coffee made with Eureka beans - grown organically in Byron and roasted in North Fitzroy - then take a seat at one of the rickety old tables on a shaded terrace with views of the cow barn, gambolling children and a frolicking calf called Dante that is trying to butt a troublesome toddler.

It's a good place to sit and watch life slip by.

Then you read that menu and the first dish is the rather menacingly named "Farmer's Breakfast" with poached eggs, mushrooms, organic chipolata sausages and the cafe's home-made beans. Perfect washed down with a latte made with milk robbed from the mouths of cute little calves just like Dante. Of course, nothing on the menu here comes from the farm itself, but that doesn't stop it being the perfect place to look your dinner in the eye, as Anthony Bourdain would have it. If only to ensure you are happy and aware of the consequences and responsibilities of being top of the food chain. I am, I eat and largely it is pretty good.

The bacon is crisp without being desiccated, but we have it with mushrooms that are baked with lumps of heat-softened fetta and a caper paste that really didn't need the porcine addition. In fact, it's the sort of vego option that carnivores squeamish about the accusing squeals might choose.

It's certainly a better pick than the corn fritters, which are bound with polenta that gives them body but also a slightly undercooked and starchy flavour. They have been bulked out with zucchini. For me, a corn fritter is about corn kernels, toasty brown edges where they bulge out from the batter and caramel sweetness. This was missing.

A hefty, veg-flecked beef sausage roll with a chunky tomato relish, however, was far better. Sorry Dante.

All of these dishes are available from breakfast onwards. There is also bircher muesli, raisin toast with cinnamon butter, and a kiddies' menu of toastie soldiers, boiled eggs and simple half-serve sangers such as cheese and ham or vegemite and cheese.

And there are vanilla pancakes with rhubarb and a cinnamon labna that make my mouth water just thinking about them - in fact, every time I re-read this line my mouth gushes like Old Faithful. I just hope next time I go to the Farm Cafe to order them there's no young rhubarb lolling in the allotments to point their leaves at me and say "J'accuse!" You know how forced rhubarb always speaks in French cliches - or is that just Toorak rhubarb?