Granite Belt Dairy is a cheese farmhouse, meaning that they make the cheese themselves using milk…read morefrom their herd of cows. Apart from making cheese, they operate a café (Jersey Girl Café) and a cheese store in Thulimbah, outside of Stanthorpe. The place is a tiny and very kitchy cheese/souvenir shop and café, pushing a quirky farmhouse feel, but falling over when it comes to the actual cheese. The unspoken promise here is that the cheese would be either extraordinarily good, or cheap and plentiful, but it ends up being neither.
Sadly, neither the café nor the cheese on sale live up to this promise. All of the meals on offer are based around cheese in some way: three-cheese baguette pizzas, grilled haloumi salad, cheese soufflé, and so on. The first problem is that the menu oversells the meals. The three-cheese baguette pizzas are nothing more than a grilled open-faced sandwich. The soufflé's are particularly tiny, and the three pieces of haloumi in the salad barely scrape in as adequate when the expectation is generous. This is made worse by the exorbitant prices charged for the meals, which start at $16 for incredibly simple meals. The halmoumi salad, for example, comes in at $16 for three pieces of grilled haloumi and some green salad. While well-proportioned for a light lunch, the price-tag is excessive.
The service tries very hard to be friendly and to have the small-town local feel. Sadly, this just translates into the wait staff chatting with the locals and ignoring everyone else the majority of the time they spend on the café floor. Food service is also surprisingly slow given the simplicity of the meals and the small size of the café. Perhaps a ploy to encourage visitors to stop by the cheese shop while waiting for their meals.
Speaking of which, the cheese shop connected to the café sells a variety of cheese and chutneys which can be sampled prior to purchase, and a few other wares such as kitchy souvenirs, chopping boards, biscuits and fresh bread. The cheese, while nice, is nothing remarkable and doesn't really sell the benefits of a farmhouse cheese. Nicer cheeses are to be had at the same price in pretty much any supermarket. The chutneys are an easier push as the variety is larger and they're harder to find elsewhere.
If you find yourself in Thulimbah and are a cheese aficionado, sample the cheese and go from there. If you're passing by and looking for a bite, go elsewhere.
