Famous chocolate-cheesecake brownies make a comeback at Heide’s new-look cafe

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What is art, anyway? For sure, it’s the Mirka Mora cherubic figures painted on the windows of Heide’s hilltop weatherboard cottage. And definitely it’s the photography in the modernist home on the grounds of this suburban museum and sculpture park. Of course, it’s whatever’s presented in the main gallery. But is it also this plate of crudites in front of me at Heide Kitchen?

Bright, crisp snow peas are nestled in a bowl with halved baby carrots and radishes, pert, trimmed, almost expectant. Whipped blue cheese is an airy but resonant dip for the raw vegetables. The dish looks pretty and it eats well: crunchy and joyous.

It’s excellent as food, but if art is something that makes you think about life and its cycles, the meaning and its magic, and it looks appealing, then I’d say this shareable entree works as a $12 artwork as well.

The menu is based around produce grown on-site in two kitchen gardens, or at the social enterprise Common Ground farm owned by Mulberry Group, the hospitality conglomerate that also has the CBD’s Hazel and Dessous and the new (and great) Cremorne wine bar Lilac.

The all-day offering starts brunchy and concludes lunchy. Crumpets are piled with hot-smoked salmon, dolloped with creme fraiche and garnished with crackle-fried saltbush. Scotch egg finds the perfect balance between oozy yolk, herby sausage and dark crumb; it’s paired with rich romesco sauce.

The garden risotto makes the most of the day’s bounty: I lucked onto a delightfully bold beetroot version, topped with chunks of roasted beetroot and mountains of dill.

It’s hard to find staff, especially in the suburbs. As the crew here gains experience the menu will expand, and there will be picnic hampers for enjoying on the grounds.

For now, there are glorious places to take a sandwich or one of chef Sarah Foletta’s famous chocolate-cheesecake brownies, served first at Apte, the Alphington cafe that kicked off Foletta and husband Nathan Toleman’s hospitality forays more than 15 years ago.

(Around the same time, Vue de Monde founder Shannon Bennett launched the cafe here; the new tenants have given the glass box with its terrace adjunct a sensitive freshen up. It feels airy and poised, though weekends can be a little stretched.)

But the brownie! The fluffiness is the initial wonder, teeth scything through cloud, and then it’s the play of sour, bitter and sweet as dairy and cocoa wrangle and writhe.

I ate this one near an osage orange tree, watching cockatoos – artists, every one of them – throw wrinkled and inedible fruit to the ground in exasperated disgust. I’m glad they’re expressing themselves with citrus, though, and leaving the snow peas for my arty crudites.