It is not the Heartbreak Hotel, but at least it is making an effort in the sadness stakes.
In a shadowy cul-de-sac in an out of the way section of Brunswick Heads squats the Café Down or, more correctly, Café Of A Down. It is surrounded by peeling weatherboard boarding houses and verges of withered grass.

One enters by a flight of rickety stairs into a dimly-lit basement, the darkness compounded by brown walls which seem to absorb any random photons of light still left glimmering. Upon said walls are foxmarked reproductions of paintings by the French artist Jules Pascin of petite filles waiting for clients, often with an absinthe at their elbows.

Occasionally we take the Bentleys there as a welcome escape from the forced wellbeing and hipness of the Bay. At the Café Down the waiters are not too cool to serve you – they do not glide past unseeing, their eyes focused on an imaginary horizon gleaming with movie contracts. Rather, the maitre d’, Gary, who himself looks like a butcher’s boy by that other French artist, sidles up solicitously in the manner of an undertaker at a suicide’s funeral, and eyes downcast asks what one might be having for lunch.

If one is having the fish of the day, then the answer is always Flounder. Only Flounder is served as the fish of the day at Café Down. Flounder, as you know, gentle reader, also means ‘struggle mentally; show or feel great confusion’. It is the esprit de corps of Café Down. The fish is one of a number of flatfishes known as ‘flounders’ – its name may have come from the  Danish word ‘flynder’, which has its origins in Old Norse. Interestingly, in urban slang ‘flynder’ means ‘to be absent from the office, supposedly working from an alternative location, for a spurious reason’.

This is generally the Café Down staff opinion of the attentiveness level of any supreme deity. It is the general opinion of the Café patrons that the flounder looks up at one sadly, perhaps mourning the fact that it has two eyes on the one side of its head, or that its camouflage on the seabed has been seen through, or that it finds itself violently deceased.

While the Café Down chef, Violet de Mornay, dwells in sorrow contemplating the demise of her ingredients, her tristesse by no means affects the quality of her cooking. Her Flounder Melancholiflower is superb – fillets lightly fried, stuffed with spinach and then baked for 20 minutes with a tomato sauce, accompanied of course by cauliflower au gratin. The wine which is always served with the flounder is the 2007 Raymond Domenech Heavily Wooded Semillon with its lingering bouquet of regret.

Each time I leave, well-fed, I note the motto burned into the café’s entrance architrave: ‘The pursuit of happiness is greatly overrated.’