Excellent cafe with a great menu and staff. We had the 'all day breakfast' plus a cup of herbal tea and thoroughly enjoyed both. This cafe is close to Gardenvale station so we were able to walk there. Definitely will be back.

Approximate cost: $22

Great, helpful service for a family lunch. Organised platters of tapas including Melbourne's best calamari!

Wow this place ticks all the boxes, other places need to learn from them. Quick service, friendly staffs, fantastic seafood and wine. Would be back again.

We took up the deals.com.au offer which promoted Bensons on Martin as the place to enjoy a great Spanish meal of some tapas for entree, paella for main and creme brulee or sticky date pudding for dessert.

The reviews looked good so we thought it was worth a try and we also brought along a friend who is from Spain and has eaten at hundreds of places and has a good idea of what Paella should be.

The venue is nice with lots of space and a light open air feel. The day was warm so our waitress happily obliged and turned on the airconditioning so we were comfortable (it ended up being over 30 degrees outside!).

The service was very quick, unobtrusive and friendly. Our waitress did everything possible to make us feel at ease and ensure that we would enjoy our meal.

So far so good, we thought, this is promising.

Then the entrees arrived. As part of the deals.com.au offer we could select any tapas we liked and we tried four different tapas. The ham and cheese croquettes, the wagyu meatballs and the scallops, followed by garlic prawns. Unfortunately the ham and cheese croquettes turned out to be quite oily, the wagyu meatballs were okay, but not really authentic Spanish Tapas, the scallops had shrunk to miniscule size (too much cooking?) and were a bit rubbery and the garlic prawns were probably the best of the lot which had lots of garlic oil to dip into with some bread and actually had a lot of flavor.

The mains - all paellas - we selected all three on offer, one Vegetarian, one Seafood and one Chicken. Unfortunately the quality of the paella was substandard. When the paella came out, it appeared to have been cooked in a bigger pan and then served in smaller pans. Original Paella is always served in the pans they rice and ingredients are cooked in. Our Spanish guest found that the rice itself was soggy, the base not crispy as real paella should be and there was so much pepper in the seafood one he was rapidly gulping down glass after glass of water. The Chicken paella was found by another diner to be quite salty and the vegetarian was probably the best of the lot? Our Spanish guest thought that the paella must have been reheated because the dishes came out quite quickly and the rice he felt was actually not the proper rice used in paella. In good restaurants, it takes quite some time to cook paella and in the best Spanish restaurants you need to tell them what you want before arriving as they take several hours to let the rice cook just right and the flavors of the ingredients meld into the dish.

When it was time for desserts, we asked the waitress if we would be able to vary the desserts on offer (only the Creme Brulee and Sticky Date pudding were available under the deal, but there was also apple pie and a mousse and a five layer chocolate cake - but the cake wasn't available that day) as we wanted to see if the desserts would make up for the disappointment so far. We said that we would be happy to pay a bit more to cover any difference in cost on the menu. The waitress was very obliging and tried her best to accommodate our request. She returned to advise that the kitchen would allow us to vary the desserts but we could only have three and not four. When we asked for the menu, we found all desserts were the same price! We could not understand why, if the desserts were all the same price that they couldn't meet our request. The waitress explained that it had to do something with the budget for the menu we had chosen. So we decided on three creme brulees and a sticky date pudding to share.

The creme brulees were actually small and unfortunately appears to be made so far in advance that some of the texture and taste had disappeared. The top of the creme brulee was not crunchy like toffee but soft. The creme brulee itself was coffee flavor and more like gluggy cheese and the cream on the side was quite solid (a bit too long in the fridge??). The sticky date pudding however was very good. The pudding was soft and moist and the sauce was warm and sticky and just right. That was the highlight of the meal!

All in all, the past reviews on places like urbanspoon rate the place well. Unfortunately if the deals.com.au menu was intended to be an introduction to the place to highlight their skills in Spanish cuisine, we found that it was unfortunately below par. Our Spanish guest was particulary disappointed with the Paella as that had been billed the highlight of the offer.

I think that the restaurant may be trying hard to attract business however works too hard to too tight a budget which resulted in a decrease in the quality of the food on offer.

Approximate cost: $25

Another nice addition to the list of cafe options on busy martin st. This place is fairly traditional in terms of the food served, however it is by no means lacking in variety, with a range of dishes both sweet and savoury, for breakfast, lunch, tea or grazing.
The place is nice yet relaxed, the kind of cafe you would meet people at for casual coffees or take your mother for a casual weekend brunch.
Service is really nice and efficient too.