AFTER a career in health administration and management, Pam Pearson and husband Bill Waller were looking for something other than a desk job when they moved back to northern Victoria.
Ms Pearson found it at the Barham Riverside Café which she took on seven years ago.
“I wasn’t ready to retire; I just wanted to do something different and that got me moving,” she said.
Ms Pearson has put her corporate skills to good use, training juniors and people returning to the workforce in the café, which employs 14 staff across two shifts and operates seven days a week.
The café offers takeaway and dine-in snacks and meals, and breakfast is available until 3pm each day.
It’s no surprise then that pancakes are among the most popular dishes, along with eggs benedict and the riverside breakfast, which includes mushrooms, tomato, onion, a hash brown, crispy bacon, and your choice of eggs on toasted sourdough bread.
There’s also fresh sandwiches, rolls and wraps, pasta and rice dishes, and a traditional roast with vegetables on Fridays and Sundays, which Ms Pearson said was always popular.
“We offer a fair variety all day every day,” she said.
“So you can have a burger, a steak sandwich or the fish and chips and you can have that at 8 o’clock in the morning if you wanted.
“We do takeaway for tea – pizzas and fish and chips – and that’s pretty flat out from Thursday to Sunday.”
Ms Pearson said one of the things that set the café apart was that much of the food was made in-house.
That includes fresh salads, homemade cakes and their famous house made sausage rolls and relish, as well as pizza bases and focaccias.
“They’re not just bought off the shelf or in bulk from a wholesaler,” she said.
“We make our pizza bases the old fashioned way and the riverside pizza is one of our big sellers.”
Ms Pearson said customers were fairly evenly split between tradies, tourists and locals.
“That’s why we have such a wide variety of items on the menu,” she said.
“We have the tradies and locals who come in every day looking for something different, and travellers who might be stopping for a quick snack or coffee and cake.”
The café also caters for business meetings and small functions, and can put together picnic style or corporate catering.
Barham Riverside Café is open Monday to Wednesday, 7am-5.30pm; Thursday and Friday, 7am-7.30pm; Saturday and Sunday, 8am-7.30pm. Phone orders are welcome on 5453 2066.
