wednesday, after a harrowing morning spent buying a fridge (and then later finding out it was $100 cheaper online, with free delivery, but would you buy a fridge online? wouldja?? in retrospect, yes, i would.) me, my mum and maeve retreated to the much more warm and welcoming arms of sopra, upstairs from fratelli fresh, where we stood in line for twenty minutes? half an hour? who can tell, when yer starving. anyway, the truth is, my mum stood in line while maeve tried to dismantle a display of bulk-bagged italian chocolates artfully arranged at the feet of a classical roman statue of a lady.

i last ate here more than a year and a half ago, when i lived just down the road, and my mum was in town, and maeve was just a few weeks old, strapped sleeping to my front. back then i ate antipasto, because of the inclusion of what is listed on the menu as “egg mayonnaise”, and arrives a perfectly boiled egg, halved, with a slurp of tangy real mayo over the still moist, golden yolk. after months of being careful about properly cooked eggs, it was exactly what i wanted.

wednesday afternoon it was sort of what i wanted too, but after we were seated, and the waitress approached, the words out of my mouth were, “oyster mushroom salad, with asparagus, kipfler potatoes and caciota“, the last of which i thought would be some sort of cured meat, but turned out to be a curdy white cheese. which was just the first pleasant surprise, because when the salad arrived, it was a mound of mushrooms, an entire small harvest really, and little discs of sliced potatoes, both of which had been grilled to the point of crunchy bits, in butter and oil and salt. and the blanched asparagus and cheese, and some mesclun, for light relief.

i wanted to eat and eat, so it was just as well that maeve was intent on guzzling the innards of her own bocconcini-and-tomato panini and was disinterested in my lunch; after losing the battle with her over the strawberry granita, it was only right that i got to eat every last mushroom.

and then having only had a light lunch of mushrooms, i thought it was necessary to have dessert. i sort of wanted the buttermilk pudding with mixed berries, but i truly, madly wanted the eton mess with strawberries.

“and um, could i get the eton mess, please?” is what i said to the waitress.

she beamed wide. “of course you may!”

it came, this great big dollop of pink on a plate. just strawberries and their juices folded into cream, atop chunks of sticky-on-the-inside meringue. oh yes. “i could eat this every day,” i told my mother, although for $12 a pop, i was being figurative. maybe.

“really?” she said. and then she had a spoonful. “oh, it’s quite nice.”

because, as you may remember, my mother does not like sweet things, i was not too concerned with the dent she was making in my pud. but the battle with the baby had already begun. she didn’t quite match me spoon for spoon, and i was making sure that my spoonfuls were bigger than hers, and really, it wasn’t hard to just keep shovelling this magic into my mouth… but at the end of it, i wanted another one, just for me, to eat very slowly in sunny sopra.