Well worth the trip into the bad lands.. While scanning the local offerings on urban spoon I came across Alex take away & read so many glowing reviews that I just had to try it out. We drove out into the bad lands of Altona & into what can only be described as a run down shopping strip that seemed from the late 1950's, a half a dozen shops, only three of which seemed occupied, one of them being this old fish & chip shop. Upon seeing the shop, a weird overwhelming sense of dejavu came over me, the memory of two cent potato cakes & the small brown paper bags with five cents worth of chips. As we walked in the door, all of those feelings were reinforced, the tiled floor, the wood panelling & the Chico roll poster with the chick in a bikini on the motor bike, we'de entered the time warp that is 11 Ford road Altona. I had a desire for a burger & the missus was after a steak sandwich, I though we should have a few potatoe cakes to go with it, hell, we need to have the full experience. It looked like a father & son team behind the jump, dad was on the grill, & Jr. was taking orders & running the fryers. We placed our orders & took a seat on the wooden bench & watched what I can only describe as a steady stream of locals greeting the guys behind the counter by name & doing what they seemed to have been doing for many years, exchanging money for food. Our order was ready. We picked up our burger, sandwich & potato cakes, all individually wrapped in white butchers paper & we headed down to Altona beach to watch the kite surfers & sample the offerings. We'll start with the burger, it was a burger with the lot, it had egg, bacon, onion, lettuce, tomato & cheese, the patty was not pure beef, but never the less a very tasty one. It was very much an old school fish shop burger with all of the old familiar flavours & textures of a good honest burger. I tend to rate Embassy cafe in Spencer st. as the pinnacle of the old school burger & a 10. Alex take away's burger comes in at an 8, it would have scored a lot higher if the patty was pure beef, never the less very very good. On the steak sandwich, now this was amazing, according the the missus & based on the taste that I had of the sandwich, completely off the scale! It was absolutely awesome, at the heart of this sandwich was a 1.5 cm slice of fillet steak cooked to perfection & incredibly tender, it came accompanied with the same fair as the burger, tomato, onion, cheese, bacon, lettuce & egg, in between a couple of slices of toasted white bread. I left the potato cakes for the last, because this is the part that is most touching as far as I'm concerned & the part that makes going to Alex take away a must do experience, I ordered four potato cakes, When I opened the butchers paper there were six potato cakes in there & a sprinkling of chips, at no extra charge. Yes the potato snacks were sensational in flavour texture, but the gesture in good business made by this establishment was something that we seldom find these days. I don't know how long this business will be around for in its current form, I sincerely hope that it will be around for a long time, I think that if you like this sort of old world service & charm, make your way out to the bad lands & give Alex a go, you will not be disappointed.
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