The Gallery Cafe - Simultaneously the Best Coffee and the Worst Service in Adelaide

The Gallery Cafe likes to consider itself relaxed fine dining - good food, wine and coffee in a relaxed setting, but with more formal service. Thus the staff are expected to serve as though the cafe were a fine dining restaurant, with all the accompanying accoutrements that this requires but without the support and training that is normally given to the staff at fine dining restaurants. Result: very pretentious, brusque and abrupt service. Table bookings on a hot day resulting in people being turned away in the rudest fashion possible. Staff scrabbling to retain their composure while rushing around like madmen and looking flustered and stressed out in the process; all no-nos in fine dining, the aim of which is to move efficiently while making the work look easy. Imagine today... all I wanted was a coffee [sweet, sweet delicious coffee]. I wanted to sit at a table and read the paper and have two or three coffees, maybe a meal, maybe a glass of wine. I was told that I could have a takeaway coffee on the bench outside... as though I was being genuinely given an option rather than rudely turned away. Nice one. So, every trip to the Gallery cafe becomes a mammoth decision. Do I dare brace the hideous staff for a fine coffee? Is the pain of possible rejection, dismissal in the most patronising manner, really worth that much? It says a lot about the standard of coffee here that the answer in infrequently a resounding YES.