The world looks different through a child's eye. Walking one to school he points out his significant landmarks like a seasoned Lonely Planet writer. There's the tree where he saw the rat with two tails. The largest spider's web ever was on the path over there. That's the broccoli tree, because it looks like . . . well, you get the idea.

Later I take another two out for lunch. We park in the car park at NMIT's Fairfield campus where the rocky scrub opposite is marked with a picket of yellow warning signs screaming SNAKES!!!!

We're here because six months ago someone with a funny sense of humour at NMIT's Fairfield campus decided that they should open a cafe in the old infectious diseases hospital. Or more accurately in the old visiting room where, one assumes, you once came to visit your favourite infectious disease. As a pursuit that seems distinctly rash.

The cafe has become popular with staff from NMIT and the Victorian Institute of Forensic Health. A few students wander through but the cafe's clientele, when we are there, is mainly working women.

The two tables and the rustic bench out front overlook the symbiotically positioned nursery selling the fruits, well the plants actually, spawned by NMIT's horticultural course. It's nicely landscaped and there's good shade from a judiciously placed tree. Inside it feels somewhat institutional and out back the combination of smokers and tanbark is quite bleak.

The menu is pretty standard corner cafe stuff; the prices similarly old school with little priced at more than $8. A soup - perhaps tomato, chilli and bean or Thai chicken served with commercial bread. Pies in flavours such as Thai chicken and Beef 'n' Burgundy bought in from Bocastle and served with salad and chutney.

Also lining the cold cabinet we found a rather good individual puff pastry flan filled largely with potato and caramelised onion set in a little quiche filling, a slightly doughy sausage roll, and a rather nasty spinach and ricotta involtini with the filling maced into submission by too much nutmeg. There are three flavours of ciabattas or pide rolls; one majoring with pesto, chicken and avocado; another with pesto, eggplant, roast capsicum, tasty cheese and baby spinach.

Pesto, Thai chicken curry, puff pastry cases. It's all enough to give a bloke a weird Twilight Zone sense that he's trapped in an old Women's Weekly cookbook.

Of course the upside of that would be the pastries - and here they do a rather good slice of plum and raspberry tart with a sweet crunchy buttery crust. They also bake their own slices, Anzac bickies, choc-chip biscuits and muffins in flavours such as raspberry and white chocolate.

The cafe is fully licensed but only sells a sauvignon blanc, Strathbogie shiraz and chardonnay made by the Australian College of Wine at NMIT's Epping campus.

After lunch the snake hunters rush over the road into Yarra Bend Park and I find myself at the edge of an escarpment, gazing at the fledgling Yarra. It looks pristine, green and rather exciting; a broad gash of nature running through the concrete of the city.

Just down that slope is another world of infinite possibilities - of dams, and yabbies, and endless summer jokes about snakes. Thank heavens that my "child's eye" is never too far away.