The Red Orange

Well placed opposite Prahran market at 194 Commercill Rd. South Yarra this is a simply furnished venue offering breakfast 'till 3.00pm, a $20 lunch and a full a la carte lunch and dinner menu. On weekends breakfast is an incredibly reasonable 1/2 price! It's a friendly place the young staff full of smiles. We started with a steak sandwich and lamb shanks. The steak turned out to be a chicken sandwich which was removed with apologies and eventually replaced with a sustantial very tender and tasty steak sandwich. My shanks, a very substantial serve, ($22) almost floating in a soup of their wine sauce came with a good size bowl of mashed potato. The menu mentioned corn, leeks and beetroot but not potato. There was no sign of the the leek or the beetroot but some corn and carrot. I inquired about the beetroot and the waitress said it's comming, although it obviously had not been. A few minutes later a it arrived with the casual remark "We found some beetroot". There is no effort to impress with presentation of the food which arrived with splashes of beetroot juice all over the dish.

I found the service amiably incompetent.

The breakfasts I saw for other diners were substantial and despite the coarse presentation everything was eaten with gusto. They have a modest and reasonably priced wine list and details are available on their web page. This is a very professional page but it bore little relationship to what the place is really like.
If you want a ploughmans lunch, or breakfast, you could do a lot worse
Score: 12-75/20