Ranges at Olinda, Olinda by Bureaucrat

Ranges at Olinda is one of the bigger cafe-restaurants in the Olinda village up in Mt Dandenong. It's a lovely touristy village which has a few of my favourites places in Melbourne, including Nourish Day Spa (who do wonderful massages), Herbicious Delicious (all the kitchen paraphernalia you could ever want for) and Soap Opera (gorgeous naturopathic beauty products). Ms S and I decided to make ourselves comfortable at Ranges for a good old catch-up.

Ranges at Olinda, Olinda, pumpkin soup and toastie

As it turns out, we both ended up choosing soups for our lunch. I went for the soup-of-the-day. A pumpkin and bacon soup, which came with a toasted cheese and caramelised onion sandwich. This a lovely bowl of soup - a generous serve and warming, it was velvety smooth. It had lots of bacon pieces too (a good thing) but it did make the soup a tad saltier than I would have preferred. The toastie was crisp and went well with the soup. All in all, a very comforting meal on a cold day.

Ms S chose the potato soup, which she loved. While I didn't get to try some, the fact that she practically licked the bowl clean was testament to how tasty it was. She said she would definitely order it again.