The Cheapest Thing on the Menu- Toastie Smith   

Cost: $9.50

Location: Various

The best thing about this challenge to try the cheapest thing on the menu, has been the fact it has enabled us to go back to all of our favourite haunts for the purpose to give me more content to blog about! *Smile*. So last week we set off to one of our utter favourites, being ‘Belles Hot Chicken’! But after a 30-minute walk (and an additional 20-minute wandering around as my wife wasn’t feeling hungry yet), we rocked up and check-out their menu and everything was eye-wateringly expensive! Back in the day the most expensive thing on their menu was their Chicken & Waffles combination, at a staggering price of $20 (this was long before Covid). But now the cheapest thing on the menu started from $24, which was Chicken and the cheapest side (we didn’t even want to ask them how much the Chicken & Waffles were going to be- a special which is only served on the weekends and not listed out on their menu). so, we slowly backed away and decided to walk back towards our side of the city and find something cheaper closer to home.

We ended back at Darling Square, and since we were in the mind for ‘non-Asian’ this time, we settled on Toastie Smith. For those who haven’t tried them before, it’s a fast-food style fusion café, with Toasties being their main sellers, but what stands them out is their Asian inspired flavours/ingredients, for example roasted sesame flavoured slaw, and seaweed as a sandwich filling.

The cheapest thing on their menu was the Eggsmith (I’m consuming more eggs these days than I’d usually consume in several months). The Eggsmith consists of a thick cut toasted white bread (sweet like a brioche bun), filled with fluffy scrambled egg, cheese, roasted sesame flavoured slaw, spicy tomato relish, sweet corn fish roe, chives, and chipotle.

Portioning: I must admit, it was small, but this wasn’t due to the fact that it was the cheapest item on the menu at $9.50, but all of their toasties are this same small size. Imagine a standard piece of sliced bread, and then trim-off all the crust and that would be around the size of a Toastie Smith Toastie. It’s served up slotted inside a carboard sleeve, so it’s mess free and designed to be eaten on the go. But I felt a little bit “homeless looking”, huddled over my small sandwich which barely peaked above my clasped hands, eating hungrily as it was Winter, and we had just spent the last 90-minutes walking around in the cold trying to find something to eat.

Tastiness: Undoubtedly it was tasty, with that combination of ingredients and flavours packed into each bite. The egg was the star, fluffy and moreish; the spicy tomato relish had a nice kick to it; and all the unique flavours came together perfectly. I just wished I had more of it! Haaha.

Quality: I’m starting to learn that the cheapest thing on the menu is often a non-meat dish, while the protein replacement is often egg. And with the price of eggs these days, I feel semi-privilege to be consuming so much of it in this current climate.  Toastie Smith are not cutting on quality to serve this up to you at the lowest price point, but it is the across-the-board small size which I think enables them to keep things profitable.

Value for money: On one hand, this has been my cheapest meal since starting this challenge at under $10, but on the other hand this has left me the most hungry and peckish after a meal. While I was eating, I was telling myself to slow down and make it last. And no joke, when I got home, I did have to supplement my lunch with a good old piece of sliced bread from our fridge.

In the end, cafes and restaurants need to cater for as wide a clientele as possible, so their potential consumer market is as large as it can be. So, eating from the cheap end of the menu, there’s bound to be some dissatisfying meals as price, taste and portioning doesn’t always go hand-in-hand. So, this might be my first meal thus far, where I’ve been left wanting.  The actual Eggsmith was fine, tasty in-fact, but boy was I still hungry afterwards though. Would I go back again? Maybe not while I’m still eating from the cheaper end of the menu, next time I want the fried chicken, as much meat as they can stuff inside their fist sized toasties!

p.s. The day afterwards we bought our own Waffle maker, from now onwards we’re having Fried Chicken & Waffles from the comfort of our own home!