The London Review of Breakfasts

Let's call it a morning

2015-08-21T11:59:00.000+01:00

Ten years ago today, I launched this blog. Today I'm closing it. Well, not closing it so much as letting it be. The 522 reviews (and op-eggs) it contains, written by 106 contributors, will still be available to read, but this will be the last new post.

By way of goodbye, here's a 'best of' list of sorts. Not of the best places to eat breakfast, but a very small sample of personal favourites from the countless surprising, funny and strangely touching pieces that have showed up over the years.

Although I hope it has sometimes proved useful, this site has only ever been roughly fifty percent about breakfast. The rest has been about seeing what we could get away with. This annoyed some casual readers. 'Your spry and flippant musings are irritating, and irrelevant,' one complained. Spry, flippant, irritating – fine, maybe – but irrelevant? Impossible. The point has been that nothing is irrelevant when it comes to breakfast.

So here's the list. It was difficult to compile, and I compiled it too quickly. And if this website still attracted comments other than from users with names like 'Car Service Gatwick', I'd ask: 'what were your favourites?':

Cereal Killer Cafe, Shoreditch by Haulin' Oats
Killer.

Cora's, Montreal by Poppy Tartt
Cohen.

Daiwa Sushi, Tsukiji Fish Market, Tokyo by Hashley Brown
Briny.

The Dervish, Stoke Newington by H.P. Seuss
Militia.

First Great Western Railways, Swansea to London by Moose Lee
Benedict.

Frank's Cafe, Southwark by Evelyn Waughffle
Conga.

Maison Bertaux, Soho by Gracie Spoon
Kenickie.

Paper Moon Diner, Baltimore by Joyce Carol Oats
Sandwich.

Republican Party Pancake Breakfast, Brunswick, Ohio by T.N. Toost
Romney.

Yummy's Cafe, Spitalfields by Blake Pudding
Gonzo.

Workers Cafe, Archway by Fi Tatta
Heartbreak.

You know what – just look at the full list. They're all great. Click one at random. Do it. Now.

Malcolm Eggs

[Eggsit, pursued by a bear]

Aung Myint Thu Teashop, Kayah State, Myanmar

2015-08-19T12:46:00.001+01:00

Aung Myint Thu Teashop

Main road, near Taung Kwe Pagoda

Loikaw, Kayah state

Myanmar

by Daw Aung San Mue Sli

Standard hotel breakfast fare in Myanmar is a disgrace: cardboard white bread, plastic margarine from Singapore, once-fried now-cold eggs, and a fried rice and a fried noodle option if you’re lucky. Watermelon slices, whether or not they are in season, despite the fact that down the road is a market overflowing with the sweetest, tangiest, freshest pineapples, mangoes, papayas, etc. Weak Lipton tea, usually in a pot used interchangeably for serving weak and bitter coffee, and tasting like a sad mix of the two. Milk powder.

This dismal state of affairs provides the best excuse for an early morning hunt for a teashop.

I left the hotel in Loikaw, skipped the Shan noodle option opposite the hotel, and wandered down the hill toward the pagoda. (Kayah state is mostly Christian and animist, but true to form the Burmese have plonked a bunch of stupas on the limestock rock that sticks out over Loikaw, as they do with most sites of natural beauty in Myanmar.)

A little teashop nestled in a small row of small shops caught my eye. I approached. They stared. Ah – you have itchagwe (a fried dough stick – when fresh from the fryer, better than any doughnut). They smiled. But it was cold. Do you have any hot itchagwe? No. An awkward pause. But would you like Nepali roti? And how would you like your tea?

They ushered me inside. I sat down at one of the four tables, facing the small TV. It was showing Death at a Funeral (not recommended), with the cleavages smudged.

The tea was brought first. The teamaster presented it and, grinning, pointed out that it was made with fresh milk, and he had given me extra ‘mi laing’. It was true. There was extra boiled milk skin in there, and a few shiny fat globules too. Heavenly.

His wife made the roti. It came with a tiny bowl of Nepali curry and a tiny bowl of tomatoey spice. Chillies had been chopped and pounded into the roti mix, and perhaps there was some potato in there too.

They told me that an Indian who worked for Telenor had come here every breakfast during his stay in Loikaw and eaten three rotis. I managed two. They were of Nepali gurkha origin; she moved down from Kalaw in Shan state (which has a larger Gurkha population) to marry him twenty years ago. They had opened the teashop in March or April; before that they lived in a village outside Loikaw and farmed. The name of the teashop ‘means the successful one’.

Pasticcio, South Hampstead

2015-08-04T18:51:00.002+01:00

Pasticcio
16 Northways
South Hampstead
NW3 5EN
020 7586 0333

by John le Café

I have elaborated previously on my trials, tribulations and near tragedies when it comes to finding a good breakfast spot in and around West Hampstead. Well, fear not regular readers, just before I moved house and started my search anew I finally found somewhere in the vicinity of Finchley Road. It was only a ten-minute walk away and as all serious weekend breakfast eaters will know, any further than this is simply unacceptable.

Not too café and not too caff; seemingly an Italian café but serving a full English: like Goldilocks before me, I had finally found one which was just right. A few people were eating pasta and one even seemed to be having tiramisu but most of my fellow patrons on this early Saturday lunchtime were, like me, indulging in a fry-up.

The staff were friendly and the menu was long, featuring both pasta and fried breakfast variations. I briefly considered copying the man in the corner with the seafood pasta, and though this passed quickly I made a mental note to one day try something new, even if just a bolognese. I doubt this will ever happen but it is nice to daydream.

The fry-up I opted for was £4.50 with tea, or more for coffee, and came with bacon, beans and short, fat and succulent sausages. They were the Danny DeVito of the sausage world, if, in fact, he is succulent, which I rather suspect he is. All the other usual suspects were there: too many mushrooms, a superfluous tomato and a lack of toast (only one slice cut in triangles). Subsequent visits, which I happily squeezed in before leaving the area, have shown that replacing the tomato with extra toast is one of the best decisions of any weekend.

The coffee was excellent. I even pushed the boat out and ordered an orange juice, freshly squeezed by a huge machine which looked like it could pulverise more than just citrus fruit. One sip of the sweet but also slightly sour liquid and I was transported back to my childhood, to family holidays in Italy, to swimming in the Mediterranean, to frolicking in the hills and tasting real oranges for the first time. It’s strange, as we never went to Italy or the Med. We sometimes went to the beach in Hastings but even now I can picture my idyllic childhood spent gallivanting around Italy in a VW camper van stopping in every orange grove to buy from old Italian farmers with a twinkle remaining in their eyes from their mischievous youth. The orange juice really was rather good.

I thought my only complaint was going to be that Magic FM was on. The inane babble of Rick Astley and sugary pop had accompanied my breakfast but as I started to mop up the last of the beans with my toast, ‘Tracks of My Tears’ by the fabulous Smokey Robinson came on and my mind was made up. Not too cafe, not too caff. Just right. This one was a keeper, well until I moved more than ten minutes away.

Salon, Brixton

2015-07-25T10:16:00.000+01:00

Salon
18 Market Row
Brixton
SW9 8LD
020 7501 9152
salonbrixton.co.uk

by Charlotte Brontëa

Do you remember breakfast before Instagram? How the porridge steamed, the bacon sizzled, and the tomatoes sputtered from the grill?

And how when you took a first mouthful, the porridge still steamed, the bacon still sizzled and the tomatoes still sputtered?

Post-Instagram, breakfast is never warm. It may arrive steaming, sizzling and sputtering, but then iPhones are raised, pictures are taken and re-taken, filters applied, captions written, and, finally, uploaded. Cold porridge follows.

Little wonder that avocado on toast has attracted such cultish devotion. It’s the only dish on a breakfast menu that doesn’t suffer for being eaten cold.

It is a blessing then that at Salon, a restaurant, delicatessen and charcuterie in Brixton market, they do the Instagramming for you.

Wake up on a Sunday morning and photographs of that day’s #brunchspesh have already been uploaded from the kitchen: grilled Old Spot pork loin, fried egg, runner beans, chilli, garlic and ginger one weekend; lamb shoulder, asparagus hash, wild garlic and a fried egg the next. The ingredients are artfully arranged, the lime wedge tilted just so.

If your tastes are more conventional there is ‘super seed’ porridge with almond milk (Instagram loves a nut milk); soft-boiled eggs and anchovy on sourdough toast; and smoked salmon with a buttermilk scone.

They will do you a Bloody Mary (bloody good) or an avocado, kale, kiwi, banana and almond milk smoothie. On Instagram this is tagged: #avos, #greenstuff, #kalekaleandmorekale.

The (obligatory) smashed avocado on toast, smoked pig’s cheeks lardons and poached duck egg is better even than the photos promise. The warm banana bread with hazelnut ganache is not just warm, but piping, fingertip-burning hot from the oven.

As you contemplate a second slice, a deliveryman arrives from Kent with vegetables for that night’s dinner. The chef leaves his kitchen and comes front of house to crunch through radishes, pare asparagus spears and pop beans from their pods before signing the invoice. Such earthy care for produce and provenance is admirably, reassuringly old-fashioned – and not readily captured on Instagram.

Smakolyk, Lviv, Ukraine

2015-06-27T19:49:00.002+01:00

Smakolyk  
5 Mykhalchuka St,
Lviv
Ukraine, 79000
+38 032 245 2284
www.smakolyk.com

by Tartine Amis AKA ‘The Ukrainian Sex Bot’

As the onetime easternmost outpost of the Habsburg crown lands, Lviv is justly celebrated for its café culture. Attending the 2015 Lviv Media Forum for four days provided me with the perfect opportunity to indulge in the town’s tradition of Austro-Hungarian inspired culinary decadence. I had also been warned before coming – correctly it turns out – that Lviv had been transformed since my previous visit five years ago. The stitching together of ever-tightening links to Poland and the European Union, as well as investments in infrastructure made ahead of the Euro 2012 football tournament, have markedly transformed the city centre. Despite the war raging on the other side of the country, this provincial and relaxed town remains by most measures the most ‘European’ in Ukraine. Yet, much here remains as it always has.

The various multi-confessional churches of this most pious of towns are all still full to the brim with fervent pilgrims. In the midst of war the city is even more staunchly patriotic than usual: there are off duty soldiers in uniform everywhere, and every third person is wearing a Vishivanka or a Ukrainian flag pin. Pro-Ukrainian political parties and volunteer battalions raise funds and distribute their literature on most street corners. Next to the central prospect’s statue of Taras Schevchenko, children boxed with a stuffed dummy of Vladimir Putin to the gleeful roaring of the adult crowd. Yet, the amount of Russian that one hears spoken in the street is a testament to both general increases in tourism and the large numbers of Russophone refugees transposed here from the East and Russian occupied Crimea. Leaving my hotel outside of the main Greco-Catholic church on the way to breakfast, I came across a military brass band performing final rites for a soldier recently killed in fighting outside of Lughansk.

There are also the ever present groups of Polish day trippers. Polish license plates are everywhere. By my rough calculations about a third of the people sitting in the opera house when I attended ‘Moses’ by the composer Myroslav Skoryk, were speaking Polish. The opera, based on national poet Ivan Franko’s long poem, appropriates the narrative of the Israelites’ forty years of wandering in the desert to symbolize Ukrainians’ aspirations for freedom from Russian subjugation. For his part, the Russian-Israelite oppressor who serves as your correspondent had spent at least forty days wandering in search of a proper strudel. That strudel, as well as myriad other tasty morsels could be had in the Smakolyk café, located on a picturesque corner of Mykhalchuka and Nalyvaika Streets. Smakolyk is Lviv’s best effort at a modern health-oriented style café. The café is situated in a light, glassy and modern aperture, a quick two minute jaunt from the opera house. Its spare, Swedish décor could belong to a café in any European capital. It is alcohol-free, vegetarian-friendly, and its advertising promises fresh organic ingredients brought lovingly from neighbouring Carpathian villages. The calorie counts are marked on the menus – an exceedingly progressive (if not almost a futurist) practice by post-Soviet standards

My omelette with generic Ukrainian cheese sprinkled with parsley and brown bread was well seasoned but otherwise forgettable. This was followed by a simple Bulgarian inspired ‘Shopski’ salad of freshly diced cucumbers and tomatoes in olive oil topped with salty goat milk Brinza cheese (close in flavour and texture to gorgonzola). It was inspired by Galicain peasant food, but was nonetheless excellent.

My companion had the fresh yoghurt and strawberry jam spread (jars of jam and preserves are also sold on the premises). The onsite bakery is oatmeal cookie and cake oriented, but the most‘Ukrainian’ things on offer are the miniature apple ‘xustinkas’ – tiny apple-filled pastries named after knotted Ukrainian head scarves. The Polish poppy seed and fig makivnyk pastry is considered a speciality, and crumbles perfectly in one’s mouth.

The strudel of honey glazed walnut was crispy and tart, dappled with heavy cream. It is possibly worth invading Ukraine to get one.

In short, the café is an excellent modern adaptation of Western Ukraine’s distinctive culinary mélange of German, Polish, Jewish, and Slavic cuisines; an intriguing modernist update of the numerous Strudel Hauses where one can drink Viennese coffee while reading favorite son Leopold Sacher-Masoch. Also, unlike many other parts of Ukraine (and the Soviet lands to Kiev’s east) where the Soviet mentality is more deeply ensconced, Lviv does not have a culture of waiters being aggressively snide and insulting while taking one’s order. Whether one appreciates this very un-Soviet politese is much like one’s choice between spinach-stuffed strudel or the traditional apple variant: a matter of taste.

Holiday Inn Express, Shoreditch

2015-05-27T09:06:00.002+01:00

Holiday Inn Express
275 Old Street
Shoreditch
London EC1V 9LN
020 7300 4300
hiexpress.com

by Joyce Carol Oats

As Joyce Carol Oats awoke one morning from uneasy dreams she found herself ensconced in her bed in the Holiday Inn Express. She was lying on her back, as it were, and when she lifted her head a little with some difficulty she could see that she was not just hungover, but that the duvet could hardly keep in position because the hotel bed was tipped towards the wall, so as to have the effect of elevating her legs above her head. Joyce felt a little helpless, but then realized that with only slightly more effort than usual she could sit erect there.

‘What happened to me,’ she thought. It was no dream. Joyce’s room, a proper room for a human being, only in the Holiday Inn Express, lay quietly between four walls, one of which had a television bolted to it. On another wall, on which there was a faint grey stain, hung a picture of blue and black swoops of paint of the kind that is only produced for chain hotel rooms.

Joyce’s glance then turned to the window. The dreary weather (the rain drops were falling audibly on the puddles of hipster puke on the sidewalk) made her quite melancholy. ‘Why don’t I keep sleeping for a little while longer and forget all this foolishness,’ Joyce thought. But this was entirely impractical, for Joyce was used to eating breakfast.

Joyce went downstairs. Here, a sea of human bodies queued for a lukewarm buffet. Joyce regarded the humans. Next to the queue stood a sign. ‘Peak breakfast times’ the sign read, and then accorded a traffic light colour to each of three times. ‘Please try to avoid this peak time’ the sign said, in reference to the peakest time. ‘O God,’ Joyce thought, ‘what kind of a hotel actually tells its guests to actively avoid the breakfast service? To hell with it all!’

Ignoring the man who was giving direction to the people in the line waiting to enter the buffet, Joyce skipped ahead and investigated what was on offer. Some vats of eggs and bacon. Grapefruit in syrup. Orange and apples. Cold cereals, milk. Yoghurts with artificial sweetener and yogurts without. All looked unappetizing.

Joyce decided to make some toast. She stood next to the toaster. Above it hung a large sign. ‘Please DO NOT put croissants in the toaster!’ the sign read. Joyce put some bread in the toaster. ‘I wonder,’ thought Joyce, ‘what happened in the toaster that created this imperative for this sign.’ While Joyce thought about the sign, her bread finished toasting. A small Swedish child helped himself to Joyce’s toast. Joyce felt an urge to cry. She made herself another piece of toast instead, and topped it with jam and cheese. Joyce sat at the hotel bar and ate her toast. Joyce regretted her encounter with the breakfast. Joyce wished she had never left her earlier position to come to the breakfast. ‘This getting up early,’ she thought, ‘Makes a woman quite idiotic.’

Hledan Market, Yangon, Myanmar

2015-02-16T09:42:00.000+00:00

Hledan Market
Hledan Road
Yangon
Myanmar

by Daw Aung San Mue Sli

Hledan Market. A squat concrete Myanmar-modernism shell of a government building, coloured in peeling light-blue paint and crammed with smallholder stalls, the small and medium enterprises of development practitioners’ dreams. This is the Socialist-era Myanmar, where the Yangon City Development Committee (YCDC) controls market access and items are weighed using antiquated balances and viss weights.

The stalls spill out onto the neighbouring side alleys. Opposite the market, promising good times ahead, there is a Sein Gay Har shopping centre. This caters for the moderately well heeled, with a Moon Bakery on the first floor which sells plastic cakes and plastic pizza and has to be reached by navigating the jumbled racks of the women’s clothing section. This is the new Myanmar circa 2000, pre the banking boom and bust and after eight years of an open economy.

And on the corner of Hledan junction itself, nestling under the new overpass of one of the worst junctions to try and pass through in a motor vehicle, where you can be stuck at the lights a good half hour, the Hledan Centre, a new shiny mega building that houses the offices of the European Union and is owned by a top crony named inter alia Tun Myint Naing and Steven Law (see Wikileaks for the full list of his names).

Thus are represented three stages of Myanmar’s promised development. For the best breakfast, I vote the Socialist era. Down one of the side alleys that skirts the market, next to the stall selling sticky rice and sweets and opposite the yoghurt seller with his sweaty pots of yoghurt and slumped plastic bags of unpasteurised milk, two ladies cook and sell fresh sweet bein mohn, ‘wheel snack’, thus named because it is the shape of a wheel. It has a texture halfway between a pancake and a crumpet, is made (I think) with rice flour and a dash of liquid jaggery, is topped with shavings of coconut and peanut, and leaves a slight shine of oil on your fingers.

The YCDC wants to move all the streetside snack sellers into designated multi-storey market buildings. They are unfairly copping the blame for the sudden (last two years') traffic. An explosion in the number of cars, a lack of viable public transport options, and a city-wide ban on bicycles and motorbikes are probably greater culprits. The proposed move represents a serious threat to breakfast in Hledan.

One of the ladies sliced up my bein mohn with scissors, into a plastic bag, and then I took it into the cool semi-darkness of the market building, and ate the chunks of mohn sitting on a plastic stool at the teastall, with a cup of strong thick sweet ‘po cha’ tea.

Often when I go out for a teashop or street breakfast, one of my fellow breakfast eaters will pay for my meal. I was seated at this same teastall in Hledan once when a chatty lady explained to me that it was part of the Buddhist way of gaining merit, and I felt momentarily a bit used, but actually what better way of dispensing merit than eating breakfast and being treated to it.

Paperback

2015-02-12T10:16:00.003+00:00

Out in the wild, directly below Red Notice

Initially published in bacon-pattern hardback, The Breakfast Bible is, from today, available in boiled-egg-portraying paperback.

To briefly recap, The Breakfast Bible takes a similarly serious approach to breakfast to The London Review of Breakfasts except, rather than the places that serve the foremost meal, it tackles overall principles and practice. By which I mean, it's a recipe book. Specifically, it's a one-stop source for all of the classic breakfast foods. How best to fry an egg? That's there. Need to make a bagel? With The Breakfast Bible, you will. Desperately seeking a recipe for granola? Cornbread? Channa Masala? Pastéis de nata? You got it.

And there are extras: good pop and rock songs to boil an egg to, breakfast-based astrology, an essay about class at the British breakfast table, and one about a hitherto under-examined dream of Freud's.

It's by me, with many contributions from others, the core cabal being Emily Berry, Richard Godwin, Henry Jeffreys and Peter Meanwell. It's published by Bloomsbury. You can buy it in bookshops. You can buy it online. Perhaps you have bought it already. You can buy it again.

Aqua Shard, Southwark

2015-02-08T09:58:00.001+00:00

Aqua Shard
Level 31
The Shard
31 St. Thomas Street
SE1 9RY
020 3011 1256
www.aquashard.co.uk

by Truman Compote

As a long-time follower of the joyously acerbic writing of Ian Martin, his comments on the Shard meant that I arrived for breakfast at the building bearing some prejudice against it: “The architectural press made a great fuss about how sterile and disconnected it is at ground level. My God, have you seen it inside? Seriously. It felt like being in some giant static advert for Everest double glazing.”

It’s become a cliché to take the Shard as a symbol for a lot of what has gone wrong in London in the past decade or so: the loss of social and affordable housing; corrupt or misguided local governance; the replacement of the public sphere by the private.

Indeed, I haven’t even finished locking my bike to the lamppost outside the many revolving doors before I am told by two men in hi-vis jackets that they aren’t at all keen on having me clutter up their pavement (despite my willingness to pay my way inside the building they guard). I politely remonstrate with them, at least asking them (as well as their more senior, suit-clad colleague) to acknowledge the small disgrace of shiny, showy London buildings attempting to claim nearby pavements as private property.

Indoors and onwards, past the brigade of black-clad, clipboard-bearing, bag-X-raying staff, then up, up in the dedicated automatic lift to the 31st floor.

Even the name of the restaurant – Aqua Shard could be a Mayfair spa for the wives of oligarchs – betrays much about the feel of the place. This is a room hermetically sealed (by vertiginous necessity), designed in an anonymously corporate and masculine style. I can imagine it finding particular favour with Formula 1 drivers, rootless tax exiles and the senior executives of FTSE 100 companies – anyone, really, likely to be on nodding terms with the style from their travels in Monaco, Dubai, Hong Kong and the like.

There’s instrumental music lasciviously wafting out of invisible speakers, Balearic lounge stuff, and it’s perhaps just a bit too Playboy Mansion for the breakfast hour.

A waiter arrives with two glass jugs, one containing orange juice, the other pink grapefruit – I choose the latter. I like that it tastes recently squeezed is only slightly, rather than overly, chilled. Good coffee follows.

Between three of us we order the full English, containing a completist two eggs, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, ham hock cannellini beans, hash brown, tomato, black pudding AND sourdough toast; the smoked salmon scrambled egg; and the lobster eggs Benedict. Everything is absolutely present and correct: the bacon has been cooked expertly; all eggs are perfectly poached or fried; and the corn pancake, filled with creme fraiche, which accompanies the smoked salmon dish, has a nourishing, filling heft. Perhaps the English muffin could have been shown the toaster for thirty seconds longer, but that would be nitpicking.

Now, of course, the pricing doesn’t bear even the remotest resemblance to a thoroughgoing English caff, with the full English, for instance, coming in at £17.50. But you don’t ensconce yourself hundreds of feet above the streets and the river two days before Christmas to scan the menu with a cost-saving eye: you are here to have a singular and distinctive treat.

We are sated. The dishes are removed. We ask for the drinks menu, before each choosing a breakfast cocktail. And there we sit, for an hour more, absorbing the play of the waxing and waning patches of sunlight, each half a mile wide, on St Paul’s.

The Wheatsheaf Inn, Northleach

2015-01-25T12:04:00.000+00:00

The Wheatsheaf Inn
West End
Northleach
Gloucestershire
GL54 3EZ
+44 (0) 1451 860 244
cotswoldswheatsheaf.com

by Peter Pain Perdu

Here is what I like: being in the country, feeling decadent, falling asleep in front of a fire and waking up with a velvety doggie muzzle against my palm. Here is what I love: all the aforementioned things but with breakfast. And this is why I love weekends at The Wheatsheaf.

The spread includes seasonal fruit — which in December was pears, clementines, and stewed berries, local honey, and yoghurt and cheese from Neal’s Yard. There were also pastries, or if you wanted something healthier, delicious bread so full of seeds any German doctor would approve. All this was mere window dressing though when compared with the majestic ham glistening at the end of the buffet. Last spring, a leg of jamon serrano flirted with all who gazed upon it. This time it was a marmalade-glazed ham perfectly seasoned with cloves.

Though I'm usually very abstemious, even on holiday, there's something about the Wheatsheaf that makes me thirsty. Perhaps it's the cozy open fires. Anyway, as I sat hungover, sipping my coffee, and looking over the menu, I couldn’t help but eavesdrop. “I don’t remember the table being quite so wobbly last night.” “That’s because we were absolutely trollied.” At least I wasn't the only one. Luckily for all of us feeling rough as badgers, there was an apothecary jar full of remedies as well as a selection of various hairs of various dogs. Full bottles of prosecco and orange juice, pitchers of Bloody Mary mix and vodka. Did I mention you could just help yourself? You could and the full bottles didn’t stop at the booze. There were full bottles of ketchup, hot sauce, and HP on every table just like at a greasy spoon. This is so much better than the many restaurants that dole out pokey portions of condiments as if patrons are greedy children not to be trusted.

As an American, I felt it my duty to order pancakes and bacon. The smoked streaky was nice and crisp and perfectly salted. The pancakes were light and fluffy. They were also very eggy. So eggy, their outsides had a delicate crust like the golden exterior of an omelette.

On day two, I ordered the French toast which was fantastic. The multigrain bread they used had been expertly dipped into a very cinnamony egg mixture, though only on one side. Whether this was intentional or not, I am not sure but it gave my French toast the effect of having a sweet shaggy beard.

I cajoled my companion, Blake Pudding, into ordering the full English. His sausage tasted as if it had been cooked hours ago and sin of all sins—the whites on his fried eggs were under done. As I was reading Edouard de Pomiane, I had to agree. “Eggs sur le plat need the greatest care, since the white must be completely cooked and the yolk should be hot, while remaining fluid.” This full English left him wishing he'd just ordered the same perfectly poached eggs with ham he'd enjoyed the previous morning.

The dining room itself is a thing to behold. My favorite paintings are a set of four patrician gentlemen, all of whom resemble the monocled Monopoly man. The juxtaposition of these Jeeves & Wooster extras with German pop artist Sebastian Kruger’s portrait of Kate Moss keep the room from feeling too serious. The décor is one part P.G. Wodehouse, one part rock and roll, and the result is that everyone is comfortable here. Long-legged Sloaney ponies in red trousers talking about summer in Fulham in daddy’s new Jag, San Franciscans in Gore-Tex discussing why Democrats need more young female senators whilst waiting with champagne packed picnics for a guide to lead them on the Cotswold’s Walk, Guardian readers, Telegraph readers, Grazia and Cotswold Life readers, people who don't enjoy reading at all, and last but not least, the long-suffering locals with obedient dogs who love the pub so much they’ll never stop coming. Thank god, as nothing quiets the roar of the butterfly quite so much as stroking the ears of a silky spaniel.

Breakfasts of Mauritius: Sunset Cafe, Chez Ally, Black River Coffee

2015-01-20T10:02:00.001+00:00

Sunset Cafe
Sunset Boulevard
Royal Road

Grand Baie

Mauritius

(+230) 263 9602

sunset-cafe-grand-baie.restaurant.mu

Chez Ally

Jardin de la Compagnie

Port Louis

Mauritius

Black River Coffee

Jules Koenig St

Nelson Mandela Square

Port Louis

Mauritius

(+230) 213 6846

blkrvrcoffee.co

by T. N. Toost

You’ve travelled for twelve hours from London, overnight, to Mauritius, three time zones away, spending £1,000 or so, only to get in a taxi and pay £30 to be driven for an hour to the opposite side of the island from the airport. You’re staying in a walled-in resort with beaches that are inaccessible to the locals, with a herd of other tourists who act as if they are allergic to the sun, and to physical activity, and to doing anything other than drinking Phoenix lager and eating fish and chips while yelling at their overweight children about not going too far into water for fear that they will be pulled under by a rip current and taken miles out and drown, ignoring the fact that their own native diet has rendered them each so plump and buoyant that the entire 1943 German Fleet would struggle to sink them. You watch them, braying and throwing litter past their distended stomachs onto the otherwise pristine white sand, complaining about how things in this damn country just don’t work, and you feel bad about judging them because to the locals you must appear so similar, but you want to distance yourself as much as possible from them whilst still maintaining somewhat cordial relations, since, you are constantly reminded, they are members of your extended family, and you have two weeks left of their shit.

You, however, are more adventurous. And you’re hungry for breakfast. You could do worse than go to the Sunset Cafe in Grand Baie, where you can get an English breakfast – not full, but close – with fresh eggs, bacon, sausage, a tomato and toast, for about £8. An espresso – or four, as I had – costs an extra £6, but you don’t have to tip in Mauritius, and you can eat the whole thing while looking over that grand, grand bay, with its teal water and clean, bobbing boats, and then you can walk around the corner to charter a catamaran to bring you to some other, smaller island.

Or.

You could take a Triolet express bus to Port Louis for about 80p, which will take 45 minutes. If you sat behind the driver, you would smell years of accumulated oil and grease coming out of the seat, and your body would vibrate with the ancient Chinese engine, making you wonder why the girls all sit in the back. The driver would swerve around moving cars, speed up, slow down, stop dramatically, almost hit bikers and pedestrians and brick walls, then finally deposit you in the back of the Port Louis bus center next to an intricately decorated Hindu temple that wouldn't be out of place in the subcontinent. You might then walk up and down narrow one-way streets past vendors selling CDs and handkerchiefs and name brand shirts, across the central mall, around and through old colonial buildings, and find yourself opposite the Natural History Museum under ancient banyan trees, their aerial roots dripping like candle wax. You might walk through the park and into the dark marketplace, through clothes hanging like curtains from the ceiling, to the far side of the building, where you would find Chez Ally. Two women would be cooking in the back, and two or three men would be standing in the front, taking orders, spooning together dhal puris, making change and small talk and handing over food. For 60p you’d get two dhals and two samosas; if you’re still hungry, you can get back in the queue that is constantly being replenished with hungry Mauritians.

Freshly fooded, you might then walk to the Port Louis Theater – it’s only five minutes away, behind the government buildings. It has been shuttered for years, but if you’re lucky, the caretaker would see you and invite you to take a tour. Founded in 1822, it’s an old, beat up colonial building; standing on the stage, you might imagine an audience of powdered concubines and their officers, who received their first commissions from Napoleon himself. The piano on the stage would still be in tune, even if the seats are no longer bolted to the ground. Exit the theater and, to your left, you’ll see a small chalkboard proclaiming prices for Black River Coffee. You could enter and see an impossibly beautiful woman working on an Apple MacBook Air, occasionally going outside to smoke, drinking coffee, greeting customers, and talking in low tones to the men preparing fish behind the counter. Imagine ordering an espresso; the beans are all from South Africa, imported especially by her. I know, I know, in Mauritius they grow and drink tea. However, this is the first cafe on the island promoting what she calls “coffee culture,” which she might mention briefly. Ask her about it, because you don’t know what else to talk to her about, and she’s so beautiful and speaks with such a lilted accent and smouldering passion that you don’t want her to stop. Leave, for an appointment with your tailor, Mahmoud Affejee, feeling as if you made an impression, as if she’ll remember you later.

Go to Mahmoud and get fitted. Pick the fabric, tell them what you want, and negotiate the price, because everything is negotiable on this island. Set up a time for the second fitting, when they mark you up with chalk and you’ll feel like you’re in a Dunhill advertisement, except in a tropical, windowless storefront instead of some London parlor.

Walk up the street and get tea and sweets. The locals would notice you trying to decide what you want and will help you choose, which makes you feel strangely rushed, as if you’re not supposed to feel like that on the island. Then, buy an individual cigarette from the man behind the counter, and smoke them inside, feeling rebellious. Step back out and buy some straw bags on the street, or clothes, or fabric; buy cowbone rings, pineapples, another samosa, or fresh-mixed fizzy drinks. Then try to find your bus home – the pickup point changes hourly, it seems – and ride back the same way you came. Enter the private beach compound once more, and realize that if you tell everyone where you have been and what you have seen, they will all bleat inanities about your sanity and ask if you were mugged, or raped, or murdered, because you can’t trust these people, they’re not like you, it’s just not civilized, and for the rest of your trip you should stay behind your stone walls and pretend you’re better than everyone else.

Five Yoghurt Trends For 2015

2015-01-12T12:30:00.000+00:00

by Joyce Carol Oats

‘I sell yoghurt containers,’ he said.

‘I LOVE YOGHURT,’ I cried.

The man looked surprised, perhaps a little hopeful. A few days past the dawn of 2015 and fate had placed us next to each other in an early-morning British Airways transfer queue at Heathrow Airport. What do you do? he’d asked me, and I’d told him, and he didn’t know what that was. But then when I asked him out of politeness what he did, and he told me, I was full of gladness, for yoghurt is my very favorite food.

For breakfast, of course, but given the opportunity, I eat it at every single meal. Provided, that is, that the yoghurt has not been made by Americans, in which case it all too often has its fat replaced by -- just thinking of them makes me want to gag -- thickeners.

‘I hate American yoghurt!’ I said to my new friend, ‘It contains... thickeners.’

‘Yes’, said the man, with the gravitas of a man who’s in yoghurt.

‘How do you get into yoghurt?’ I said, ‘Were you just really interested in dairy culture?’

‘Gotta make a living,’ said the man, and then he proceeded to deliver five key insights about 2015 In Yoghurt:

1. The Greek yoghurt market is saturated. As if with spilt milk. Fuck you, Chobani.
2. Yoghurt containers are going to change. There are going to be some new kinds of yoghurt containers, said the man. Will this make it more difficult for us to recognise yoghurt?
3. Indian-flavored yoghurts are also on the horizon. ‘You know,’ said the man, ‘Like, curry.’ But will it contain thickeners?
4. A new kind of Australian yoghurt will soon enter the market. ‘It’s by the guys who make soy milk,’ said the man. I love those guys!
5. Savory yoghurt is going to be a thing. ‘I think they extract the sugar from, like, carrots and broccoli,’ said the man. ‘Actually, the beet flavor is good.’ Look out for the beet flavor.

We got to the front of the line and I let the yoghurt container salesman go ahead of me: because of my gratitude for these yoghurt insights, and because he was also about to miss his flight. I waved him a jaunty farewell as I, too, approached the counter.

‘I need to pick up my boarding pass,’ I said to the counter attendant, ‘for BA 1506.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘That’s a codeshare with American, so you’ll have to pick it up over there. You were in the wrong line.’

‘Or perhaps,’ I said, with an enigmatic smile, ‘perhaps I was in exactly the right one.’

Cereal Killer Cafe, Shoreditch

2014-12-16T07:46:00.000+00:00

Cereal Killer Cafe
139 Brick Lane
Shoreditch
E1 6SB
07590 436 055
www.cerealkillercafe.co.uk

by Haulin' Oats

I'm stood on Brick Lane, East London. It's 6.45 on a Wednesday morning. It's 2014. And I'm lost in thought.

Was it always like this? There was always posturing. Style everything, substance just for abuse. But wasn't there also creativity, spirit - original, fresh energy? Something more than the mechanical application of formulas for being and doing?

I notice that everyone else has gone in. It's opened. I walk in the door and a thousand fizzing characters, human, animal and indeterminate, gleefully enthusing me to imbibe sugar from their box-source stare down at me. I walk past two girls with undercuts planning yoga, festivals and polo for next summer, and then I see them. The twins. Grey hair, beards, sparky eyes and grins. They're discussing childhood TV.

'But you know The Magic Roundabout was all about drugs?'

'Ah it was GENIUS. They had to be on so many drugs to write amazing stuff like that...'

They notice me.

'Ah! You're the reviewer?!' says one. I nod.

'The reviewer!!' they exclaim in unison, 'we hope you like our cereals'.

'Well I've tried a lot of them already,' I reply. 'You'll answer my questions?'

'Questions? We've been known to answer questions,' says one.

'By all means!' cries the other. 'I'm a veritable question answering expert! I used to play Bamboozle on Teletext every day. Do you remember Bamber Boozler? What a genius! I love Bamber Boozler!'

'Yeah, he was a geeeenius,' says the other.

'What's your favourite cereal?' I ask.

'Marshmallow flavoured Rice Krispies.'

'Vanilla Chex - with strawberry milk! Strawberries and creeeeeeeeeam! Mmmmmmmmm!!!'

'Which celebs, other than Nathan Barley, do you think will come to your cafe?'

'Oh we think lots! All of them!' Pronounces one.

'Ones even more famous than Nathan Butler,' says the other.

A wave of nausea suddenly hits me. I'm staring at my notes and the room feels like it's breathing. Then the rest just pours out.

'Is your cafe ironic? Do you really like ADHD kids' food? Or just jokingly like it? Is there really anything to celebrate here beyond a profound efficiency in the delivery of deadly consumption habit forming food to minors? Or is that the point? Is this an indictment by celebration and submission? Hence Cereal 'Killer' Cafe?'

The one that played Bamboozle every day is perfectly still, looking at me with thunderous eyes. His beard is prickling, rising on end. The other is wiping his hands down his face, turned slightly away, skittering between a high pitched titter and a sort of wet, bubbly whimper.

A pause, a no-man's land. All meaning, the great cultural edifice of our psyches melts away.

His fist flies, I duck, but at the same time plant my hands on the the counter and roll across it, smashing into them amid wet grenades of cereal inspired cake. Bamboozle tries to pull the till down on my head but I'm rolling away. Springing up I head butt him in the neck, sending him flying into the wall of cereals. I spin around bringing up my elbow as I do and sharply crack his twin in the temple. He melts unnaturally into the mass of cereal. Three twitches and still. Bamboozle is charging at me swinging a Tony the Tiger skateboard that he's ripped from the wall. But I'm ready and I plough forward taking the blow in my midriff, my weight crashing onto him and he falls backwards. We land with me straddling him. I've got one hand on his neck, squeezing, the other grabbing handfuls from the multicoloured sea of cereal surrounding us, stuffing it in his mouth.

'It's more than a fucking crap ironic joke. You are the fear and the meaninglessness and submission to The Man, you are his insidious veil of baubles. You are the destruction of truth and beauty. You are the sick infantilisation of our culture. You are adult humans running around in fucking Teletubby costumes slathered in wacky goo goo baby sentimentality. You are the irony stitched Buffalo Bill cloak of kiddy culture skins, masking reality, obscuring the cage we're in. Your cafe is seventh tenths horrifying, and two tenths a really good idea I wish I'd had, and one tenth... one tenth...'

Bamboozle is still.

There's a lot of cereal in his beard.

As I rise up the two girls have overcome their shock and start running for the door. 'Mummy's - Sloane Square,' one shouts. I walk across the Cereal Killer Cafe covered in Lucky Charms, Chocohoops and blood. I step out onto Brick Lane, East London.

I start. I'm stood on Brick Lane. It's 7.15 on a Wednesday morning. It's 2014. I've been lost in thought. Deeply daydreaming.

I walk in to the Cereal Killer Cafe, a place that serves a huge selection of breakfast cereals - over 60 from all around the world. It's £2.50 for a small bowl and £3.20 for a large, with milk on the side included. They have thirty different types of milk. And they have toppings too, such as Mini Oreos, at 20p extra. This all translates into the neat concept of cereal cocktail creations, for example:

Double Rainbow: Trix, Fruity Pebbles and freeze dried marshmallows served with strawberry milk.

Bowloccino: Nesquick and Cocoa Pebbles served with espresso milk and a flake.

Chocopotomus: Coco pops and Krave served with chocolate milk and a Kinder Happy Hippo.

The Cereal Killer Cafe has most definitely captured folks' imagination, kicking up a good old multi-flavoured stir. Buzzfeed love it and have done a list or two on it, Vice have assessed its pop cultural significance and compared visiting it on DMT to visiting it on aspirin (probably), Time Out like it but also allow that you can hate it - because that's cool too. The owners have received marriage proposals and death threats and there's been a mighty furore about one of them cutting an interview short after being asked whether charging £3.20 for a bowl of cereal can be justified in one of the poorest boroughs in the UK, an interview question so preposterous that you'd be horrified to witness it in some kind of deranged daydream, never mind from Channel 4 in so called reality.

I walk past a Tony the Tiger skateboard on the wall and a portrait of TV cereal killer Dexter constructed out of various shades of toasted Cheerios. I'm in a theme cafe. It's like something you'd find in Japan. Or Shoreditch.

I decide to go for the Bowloccino. I enjoy the first two spoonfuls. A lot. But the sugar overwhelms me. It's sickly and samey, a two dimensional dish. Maybe in just the right situation and mood I'd relish the whole bowl, and this maybe would have occurred much more frequently when I was a younger man.

Cereal is a food almost entirely created by entrepreneurs and marketeers, which is why being able to see all the design and paraphernalia is an important part of the visit. A mini, niche, museum-cafe, a fun experience and a fine addition to the hipster theme park that surrounds it (which, as we wind our way towards Spike Jonze's vision of the not so far future presented in Her, may extend indefinitely).

However, as for eating there...Well, if you like a lot of sugar, delivered with blunt happy flavours, or you're in that kind of mood, then, grrrrreat. But on the whole I'd say it's just like with kids' TV shows: you should never go back. You remember them as magical, but try watching them now and you discover that they're mostly terrible. Their poverty was swept away by the transformational imaginative energy of youth. And, unfortunately, I just don't have the energy for fruity pebbles with marshmallows and strawberry milk any more.

The bearded twins seem like nice guys. They wave me goodbye with warm smiles. I pause for a quick final look at the Tony the Tiger skateboard on the wall and step out onto Brick Lane, East London.

A history of Soho in five cafes

2014-12-13T14:14:00.000+00:00

by Malcolm Eggs

Amid all the talk of Soho's slow drift into becoming just another homogenised part of central London, here's a piece I wrote in 2012 for Esquire magazine.

Maison Bertaux (est. 1871)

This salon du thé was founded by refugees escaping the bloody aftermath of the Paris Commune and now stands as the most enchanting remnant of a time when Soho was also the ‘French quarter’. Amazingly, the business has only changed hands twice in the last 140 years. The current owner, Michelle, started working here as a ‘Saturday girl’ in 1971. Her establishment deploys replica roses, French café music, pink netting and paperback novels to create an atmosphere that makes you want to get into handwritten correspondences with women of unclear motives. Breakfast is coffee with buttery croissants and pastries made, as they have been since forever, fresh on the premises.

The Star Cafe (est.1934)

The ‘Star Special’, served all day, is two eggs, bacon, sausage and tomatoes. It comes with a round of hot buttered toast and is delicious, especially the eggs, which have been basted in hot oil so as to slightly seal the yolks. This dish hasn’t changed much since the cafe was founded, although the owner Mario notes that the menu has gradually lost the likes of bread and dripping, to be replaced with things like eggs Florentine. His father, Pop, bought the business for £320, at a time when the building also hosted the mysterious Baudha Manoli Yaghurt Company.
Note: Mario Forte sadly passed away in the spring of 2014 and The Star is now run by his daughter Julia.

Bar Italia (est. 1949)

At breakfast-time Bar Italia is authentically Italian or in other words completely indifferent to the idea of eating. If you must have food, there are a few pastries on the bar, but the main event is coffee, preferably espresso, flowing from a clanking Gaggia machine and then drunk either perched inside on a high stool, or around one of the crowded stainless steel tables on the street outside. The onetime subject of a Pulp song, Bar Italia has a large plasma TV for sporting events: fitting given that this is the building from which John Logie Baird transmitted the world’s first recognisable television images.

Bar Bruno (est. 1978)

In a strip of shops containing Pret a Manger, Carphone Warehouse and a brash arcade called Las Vegas, Bar Bruno is a comforting sight – one of those classic London hybrids of trattoria, sandwich bar and greasy spoon. The original Bruno sold up just over a decade ago, and the site of his cafe began its life as a food establishment in around 1960 when an entrepreneurial couple found they could do a roaring trade selling tea, coffee and biscuits from a small space next to where you’ll now find the crisp rack. Today, good, hearty, greasy breakfasts and strong cups of tea are dished out to an endless stream of regulars.

Balans Café (est 1987) and Balans (est 1993)

There are a lot of chain restaurants in Soho, but the key difference with Balans is that it started here. Founded when the Soho clubbing scene was at its peak, Balans was designed to fit in with the resulting clock-indifferent lifestyles. Among other things (‘chill-out room chic’ furniture and soundtrack) this meant serving breakfast in the middle of the night, after the clubs shut but before the first train home. If you want excellent cinnamon French toast or a breakfast burrito at 3am, this is still where you come.

Old Coffee Pot, New Orleans, USA

2014-12-06T17:58:00.001+00:00

Old Coffee Pot

714 Rue St. Peter

New Orleans

Louisiana

+1 504 524 3500

www.theoldcoffeepot.com

by Louie Slinger

Given the New Orleans habit of carousing, it's no surprise to anyone, I guess, that there's a tradition of great breakfasts that are served until sometime in the afternoon. The Old Coffee Pot, right in the middle of the French Quarter, has been feeding folks, both hungover and otherwise, since 1894. A nice old townhouse with both inside dining and tables on its patio and covered driveway, it draws locals as well as tourists. It was a local who took me there the first time, in fact.

The menu offered lots of New Orleans specialties. Louisiana is rice country: calas, rice cakes rather like rissoles that were once sold from baskets by street criers, show up, paired with syrup. They're dense with a crunchy outside, just the thing to absorb any alcohol lingering in one's gut.

New Orleans likes to play with the eggs Benedict formula. There were four variations here, including eggs Sardou, which poses creamed spinach and an artichoke heart under the eggs instead of ham, and eggs Conti, which begins with a tender split American biscuit, piles on sauteed chicken livers and spring onions all in a winy sauce laced with a suspicion of garlic. Rich? Well, just. On this trip I succumbed to the Rockefeller omelette, which was full of oysters, creamed spinach and cheese, and probably packed enough flavor to raise some of the bodies buried behind St. Louis Cathedral, over a the next block.

Ladies who've worked there for years kept things humming, as they always do. In early December, late one quiet morning, five customers held hands and said grace before beginning their meal. (Not all visitors are sinners; occasionally there are church conventions in town.) When their meal was finished, they paid their check and the waitress wished them a merry Christmas, and added, "Remember, Jesus is the reason for the season." And then she planted her feet, squared her shoulders and let fly with a spontaneous, stunning gospel rendition of 'Silent Night'.

Never forget - this is a city where anything can happen.

Mani's, Hampstead

2014-11-30T15:15:00.004+00:00

Mani’s

12 Perrins Court

Hampstead

NW3 1QS

020 7435 0777

by John LeCafe

Mani’s had been somewhat of a tradition for me a few years ago. I worked in an office close by where meat was banned by the vegan boss. Pork Fridays, as I and a colleague termed them, were our way of protesting against this.

On the morning I returned, the weather was beautiful. It was one of those clear, crisp, cloudless days that seemingly only autumn can produce. As the cafe is set down a lovely cobbled street with no passing cars, I decided to sit outside. It had provided blankets on the backs of the chairs, but given both the weather and the speed with which I had walked up the hill, these proved unnecessary.

They had two kinds of fry-up. One was a bit pricey and the other even pricier. Tea was not included either. Still, this was Hampstead. When the waitress came, I surprised myself by going for the expensive option and surprised myself even more by going for wholemeal bread. I must have been swayed by the location and ambience.

The staff were friendly, polite and incredibly quick. They offered me choices about everything that seemed pertinent (sauce, bread and type of tea) and smiled warmly whenever they passed. The tea arrived within moments, toast shortly after and the rest of the breakfast was not far behind. The toast was made from thick and hearty bread, and the breakfast featured a higher class of sausage and perfectly cooked eggs. But something seemed to be lacking.

I was struggling to put my finger on it. Here was a trip down memory lane on a glorious autumnal day and an excellent breakfast, but soon I realised it was the other customers who were affecting my experience.

One couple a few tables down from me were sat quietly enjoying coffee while at their feet a small dog scuttled about. The dog had a pink jacket and a hairstyle which is normally popular with young girls and, I believe, is called a pineapple. However, this was simply amusing and not affecting my meal.

It was the estate agents sat a few tables in the other direction who were coming close to ruining it. They spoke loudly and boringly to each other of million pound deals and commission cheques. Often they took calls from clients who they would talk to as if interested while indicating to their colleague what a bore they were: smiling, laughing and joking on the phone as they made derogatory hand signs to their dining companion. Finally, once their phones had stopped and their talk of money ceased, they moved on to discuss shooting in unnecessary detail or to just staring at any woman who walked past.

This is a wonderful café with fantastic staff and a top-notch fry up, but I will take a closer look at who else is there before sitting down next time.

Hog Island, San Francisco, USA

2014-11-16T15:54:00.001+00:00

Hog Island

Ferry Building Marketplace

One Ferry Building

San Francisco, CA 94111

+1 (415) 983 8000

www.ferrybuildingmarketplace.com

by Des Ayuno

The last time I saw H, it was also over breakfast – ten years earlier, at a smart café on Melrose in West Hollywood. I think we both thought it safest, it being too civilised for coffee or knives to be flung. I’m pretty sure he had eggs Benedict, while, trying to distance myself from him, from our heretofore near-perfect culinary harmony, I ordered something sweet, probably French toast. It was uncharacteristic. I am not, as I’m sure he would agree, a “sweet” person. I didn’t even have the option of delightful crispy bacon to soak up the maple syrup – I didn’t eat meat, then. But, well, he didn’t eat cock, then. We’re different people now.

When I arrived, San Francisco was suffering an uncharacteristic heat wave. Already fuming at the early-morning start and at my own weakness in thinking this was a good idea, I clambered up hill after hill, the bright-green Prada heels I’d been determined to wear slipping across the sidewalks, and arrived dripping with sweat at H’s aggressively trendy ad-agency workplace. Reception was at the top of two flights of marble stairs and as I tried to catch my breath, I reflected on the grotesqueness of its gold-patterned wallpaper. Then I realised it was shelves upon shelves of glassed-in Clios and Roses and those chunks of gilded tin they hand out at Montreux, stretching into the distance.

After fifteen minutes or so, he bounded down the big central staircase, unapologetic and skinny and glowing as ever. We dawdled down to the waterside as he rambled with mock chagrin about all the trips to Delhi and Dubai he’d had to make recently; the time-sapping TV pilot he was developing; the expensively decorated, lonely city-centre apartment; the much older boyfriend, whose ex-wife and children dared to stake a claim on his time and substantial bank account. We stopped at a chic oyster bar where the waitresses all knew his name and, ever the gentleman, he guided me solicitously to the seat with the most picture-postcard-perfect view of the Bay Bridge, with hands that had always felt like soft, nimble brown paws.

Americans have funny ideas about what constitutes brunch. Or maybe it was normal for ad men, or for borderline-eating-disordered gays in San Francisco. H ordered a massive platter of oysters (“All Pacific, obviously,” he reminded the waitress with a wink) and a crispy, gooey, three-farmers-market-cheeses-on-grilled-artisan-sourdough sandwich that he suggested we split but only watched me eat with hungry, shining eyes.

Afterwards, I sat down in front of the Ferry to watch the pigeons. They were bigger than London’s nervy, ragged birds, glossy and sedate. I wanted to tell H that they chose marriage and kids and got fat and stupid. I wanted to ask if he remembered the icy winter night a few months after we met, when we argued, even worse than usual – him screaming, me sobbing, somebody coming down from upstairs to scream at both of us to shut up. He had stopped instantly. Then he had poured two shots of whiskey, looked at them for a long minute, and flung them out the window into the snow. He had taken my hand in the newly echoing silence and pulled me into a wordless, graceful waltz until I slumped into him, exhausted.

My phone rang. I ignored it for a minute, then reached inside my bag. Next to the phone was a small package. Under the brown-paper wrapping and narrow red ribbon was a crinkly bag of very expensive jasmine-flower tea, and another of dried orange slices, which I’d bought in Beijing two years earlier, seeing them next to each other on a supermarket shelf like glowing talismans and suddenly panicking that I hadn’t seen H in eight years and might never see him again. We’d listened to Leonard Cohen nonstop in those first few months, although that day on the waterfront I was thinking less of “Suzanne” than of another song, the one I still can’t bear to hear, with its extraordinary, searing selfishness. “If I have been unkind,” he croons, “I hope that you can just let it go by.” I guess we’ve both tried in our way to be free.

Smiths, St Leonards-on-Sea

2014-11-03T09:19:00.001+00:00

Smiths
21 Grand Parade 
St Leonards-on-Sea
East Sussex
 TN37 6DN

by Nelson Griddle

To St Leonards for the weekend, where my sister has recently bought a one-bedroom flat there for a sum of money that would only get you a shoebox in London, and a pretty poky shoebox at that.

Late autumn sunlight shimmers on the sea, the shingle is endlessly entertaining to my one-year-old son, and not very much seems to happen on the streets lined with faded, slightly wedding-cakey Victorian stucco houses.

In total, it feels a bit like Brighton in the early Nineties, kept from more rapid development by the slow train – and even slower A21 – to London.

But we’re not here for the travel details, I hear you cry. What are the breakfasts like?

We go to Smiths on the sea front (their strapline is “Real Food”) to find out, and taste a truly excellent full English. My New Year’s resolution a couple of years ago was to eat more quality pork products – something which, like most of my NYRs, I have failed to achieve. However, this sojourn to sunny St L’s helps me to make up for lost time.

The Cumberland sausages are superb. Ditto the bacon and black pudding. The baby tomatoes, moreover, are bursting with flavour, and the poached eggs (territory on which your average short-order cook often slips up) are top notch.

Which only leaves the service. They are friendly enough, these St Leonards folk, but I have to articulate a gripe when it comes to our waiter’s shirt. On this particular Sunday morning he was sporting a pale blue Ralph Lauren number. Difficult enough to take exception to, you might think, were it not for the fact that the back of this garment was soaking – literally soaking - in sweat. I’ve no doubt waitering is hot work, but at what point does waiterly perspiration put your punters off their grub?

This is a question for Smiths to ponder. Along with the issue of what on earth “real food” means. The opposite of ontologically non-existent food, perhaps? Or existentially inauthentic food? I suspect the issue of sweaty shirts will prove less philosophically abstruse.

Café Bon, West Hampstead

2014-10-20T11:48:00.002+01:00

Café Bon
94 West End Lane
West Hampstead
London
NW6 2LU
020 7624 7548

by John le Café

West Hampstead is not blessed with a lot of good breakfast options. There is only one proper caff but it is sub-standard, and there are posh cafés, but on a Sunday, with a hangover, I didn’t want to spend £9 on something involving sourdough bread.

When I neared Café Bon I saw a sign outside which advertised it as a ‘Caffee’. Now, I have often considered the differences between a caff and a café but a ‘Caffee’ was a new one on me.

Inside I found out that it was a hybrid: part caff and part café. They had a full range of healthier sandwiches and salads but still offered a full English for £4.50. A few of the tables were busy with people talking or reading the newspapers. I was encouraged.

I ordered from the slightly surly owner and waited. I began to worry when my tea did not come. I waited and eventually it did arrive but not on its own. It came with the rest of the breakfast. Upon tasting it seemed that the tea bag had been left in the whole time the breakfast was cooking. It was thick, bitter and also too hot to enjoy with the food. Not a great start.

There were, however, some positives. The sausages were good – the expensive end of cheap caff sausages. Probably full of sawdust and cheap cuts but undoubtedly the best type of sausage for a Sunday morning. There was also enough toast. Four slices of wonderfully cheap, thick, white bread. And loads of beans.

That’s where the positives end. The toast, though plentiful was in the wrong place. It was all under the beans. This meant it was impossible to enjoy a piece of toast which wasn’t slathered in tomato sauce. Now I, like most people I presume, enjoy beans on toast but I also wanted other things with my toast.

The mushrooms were greasy and tasteless and I only had two sad-looking slivers of a grilled tomato. The fried egg was hard in the middle and there wasn’t any brown sauce. I may repeat that to emphasise the point. There was no brown sauce in the entire place.

Then we have to discuss the bacon. Surely, the most important element of the breakfast and one that if done well, could have lifted the rest of the disappointing meal. But this wasn’t real bacon. It was imitation bacon. It had no fat, no flavour and a strange, almost burgundy, colour. I feel calling it bacon is a grand exaggeration.

I waited for the owner to finish the loud argument he was having over the phone and paid. One to avoid. Next weekend I will begin my search again.

Café 1001, Spitalfields

2014-09-24T09:24:00.005+01:00

Café 1001

91 Brick Lane

Spitalfields

E1 6QL (on corner of Dray Walk)

by Marge E. Reen

Breakfast ordered: Full English

Cost: £6

Time: 9 am Sunday morning.

Weather conditions: Hot and humid.

Location: Bench in alley off Brick Lane leading towards Rough Trade East. In the evenings Café 1001 is always heaving with drunk people eating burgers and fried chicken from the outdoor grill but at this hour it was sleepily quiet, too early for the hipster hordes to have surfaced.

Service: Charmless.

Forensic analysis

Exhibit A (sausage): Looked like a pallid penis in a ripped condom. Barely browned, microwaved, dubious pink colour. When I complained the manager insisted it was ‘a very nice Cumberland sausage’ despite all visual and gustatory evidence to the contrary.

Exhibit B (eggs): Bone dry, leathery and not scrambled, which was what I had asked for, although the waitress/cook insisted I hadn’t.

Exhibit C (tomato): Hard, unforgiving and had only glimpsed a frying pan.

Exhibit D (coffee): Piss-weak.

Exhibit E (beans): The sauce had a mealy, furry quality, which suggested this item had been cooked a while before and reheated, possibly several times.

Exhibit F (bacon): Overcooked but passable. About the only thing they didn’t manage to entirely screw up apart from...

Exhibit G (mushrooms): Decent, but could not compensate for the fact that my stomach had been utterly turned by Exhibits A and B.

Exhibit H (white toast): I sent my breakfast back before I got a chance to taste this but I don’t imagine this café is capable of toasting bread properly.

Verdict: Guilty of serving badly-cooked, borderline inedible food. After a brief (and relatively restrained) confrontation with the manager I got a refund. I hope my case for the prosecution has persuaded you not to go to this café. One of the worst breakfasts I have ever attempted to eat. I did consider forcing myself to finish it as I was hungry but I feared I would get food poisoning from the sausage, or something worse.

Wetherspoons, Leeds

2014-09-16T08:25:00.000+01:00

Wetherspoons
North Concourse
Leeds City Station
Leeds
West Yorkshire
LS1 4DT
0113 247 1676
www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk/home/pubs/wetherspoons-leeds

by Michel Houellebrecq

What, or maybe more precisely who, in the name of God is a ‘Wetherspoon’? Sure, the website blathers on with some cheerily happy-clappy explanation, but I’m not convinced. If he (sorry) is a bloke, rather than a piece of undecidable cutlery, then I’d like to imagine he’s a pretty decent, salt-of-the-earth kind of (Northern) bloke, fresh back from a day’s honest graft to get in a couple o’t’ales for t’lads. It’s more likely, however, that he’s currently reclining on an inflatable lilo, sipping umbrella’d Pina Coladas as a fleet of nymphets (sorry, again) pamper his tootsies and buff his W-monogrammed belt-buckle.

Whoever he is, if the Leeds examples of his offerings are anything to go by, he’s onto a winner and his brand has turned things around, casting off images of sticky-carpeted hovels filled exclusively with the disturbed, the aggressive and the lonely. I was on a fleeting visit to Yorkshire and, whereas five years ago I would’ve pretended I’d gone to the infinitely classier (or slightly less shameful) All-Bar-One instead, I’m proud to publicly state that the only licensed hospitality I received during my time in the UK’s third-biggest city was from J.D. Wetherspoon Esq. Yes, you heard correctly.

I’d been impressed by the Thursday nite vibe of the Beckett’s Bank Branch. We’d wandered in there half by mistake: we were tired and hotelling in the vicinity, your Honour. I had to do a double take. This wasn’t the Wetherspoons of old. Where were the broken chairs? The shattered glass? The muscly dogs? The eight-man brawls? They’d been replaced by families, cross-cultural groups drinking coffee and having intelligent-looking debates, craft beer, real ales and fancy ciders. No-one was being beaten up, especially not me. We were so impressed, in fact, that we made a date for an early breakfast the following morning at the Station branch (this one didn’t open early enough); the newly-launched menu looked promising.

I wouldn’t normally dream of eating, or drinking (or maybe even breathing) in most British train stations, but if you put the depressing thought of the guy on the fruit machines gambling hard at 7.30am on a Friday out of mind, it was a joy. Cheap, decent, tasty, well-cooked, I might even dare ‘hearty’ fodder: what’s not to like? £4.60 for a ginormous ‘large’ cooked breakfast, £3.90 for a much more sensible ‘traditional’ version of the same. Everything you’d want was present and correct; sausages had substance, toast had poppy seeds (POPPY SEEDS!) and it was just the right side of greasy. Yeah, so the mushrooms might’ve been slightly on the soggy side, and they insisted on giving us each half a grilled tomato (who the hell actually eats them?), but I’m splitting hairs. They even have a selection of porridge and fresh fruit with ‘Greek-style’ honey. All the calories are clearly displayed for the post-5/2 generation. Coffee was good (hot, strong) and you get free refills until deep in the afternoon. Under £11 for breakfast for two. It’s a bleedin’ public service. Criticising this would be like slagging off a sunny day, although, rest assured, I’ve been known to do that. Whether Herr Wetherspoon is an honest sod, or a smily spiv, it matters not. His gaff is worth a (re)visit.

ChwarChra Hotel, Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan

2014-08-12T18:00:00.001+01:00

ChwarChra Hotel
Sheikh Abdulsalam Barzani Street
Erbil
+964 66 2231508
www.chwarchrahotel.com

by Thom Yolke

Unless you happen to live in a cave with a dodgy router, it’s more or less impossible to avoid the torrent of unsettling news coming from Iraq at present. The black flags of the Islamic State have unfurled across the country, plunging the whole region into ever greater uncertainty. And yet, it was only in May of this year, just before ISIS (as they were then known) began literally bulldozing the borders, that I found myself having breakfast in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Erbil, the capital city of the Kurdish territory, was, until recently, a relatively safe and even prosperous place, due largely to the steady flow of oil money that has seen shiny new hotels continue to sprout up on an almost weekly basis. These hotels, I quickly discovered, cater largely to those who want to preserve a semblance of Western continuity. Their lobbies chime with muzak versions of British or American power ballads, and their menus offer Western staples to reassure the far-from-home oil men. I would be staying in a different sort of hotel altogether.

My hotel had the look of a place that had witnessed another era, and survived it. A whitish, boxy building which had begun to flake at the edges, the entrance was adorned with a flickering neon sign, and lined with an eclectic menagerie of taxidermy. Beady eyed goats and lion cubs appeared locked into eternal staring contests. There was a distinctly bohemian atmosphere among the labyrinth of sofas that lined the lobby, as though you could expect to hear two local poets having a heated argument about form while becoming increasingly enveloped in a cloud of shish-a smoke.

On my first morning, I ventured over to the buffet and at first was underwhelmed, but on reflection I realised that’s because I didn’t really know what I was looking at. Some of the options looked familiar enough, sliced pineapple and dates, yoghurt and honey. It was only when I was encouraged with a gesture from the waiter to try a thick creamy substance that I initially passed over, that my eyes were opened. The waiter, not speaking English, nodded that I should combine it with a fine, dark looking jam which I noticed had a golden iridescence to it as I spooned a generous splodge over the fluffy cream. The waiter signalled his approval with a thumbs up and a wink as I sat down. The first mouthful confirmed that it was fresh fig jam, a Biblical fruit rendered into sin. The strong flavour of the jam was complemented by the cleansing neutrality of the cream, which after further enquiries I discovered to be buffalo curd, also popular in neighbouring Iran and Turkey. Less rubbery than its cousin mozzarella it possesses a paradoxical lightness of flavour with a decadently whipped texture. It occurred to me that this combination was probably an ancient delicacy, enjoyed by the Sumerians or Babylonians who could afford such delights. Being a novice and aware that there were no set limits on quantities at the buffet, I may have slightly overdone the portions. Four helpings later, like any hedonistic Babylonian, I could barely move from my chair, and the sympathetic nodding of the waiter as he collected my bowl told me he was no stranger to this sensation either.

It took me most of the day to recover from the overwhelming richness of the dish, but it didn’t stop me going back for a single helping the following morning, or the next.

Riverside Cafe, Clapton

2014-08-07T08:41:00.003+01:00

Riverside Cafe

Riverside Cottage

Spring Hill

near Springfield Marina and Lea Rowing Club

Clapton

E5 9BL

020 8806 4448

by Marge E. Reen

‘Lisa and Stacy welcome you,’ said the sign outside, but we didn’t feel very welcome when we went in and the two girls on the counter ignored us for five minutes before one sulkily asked what we’d like.

‘A breakfast,’ said Mr Reen.

‘Breakfasts finish at 12 o’clock. It says it on the sign.’

This must have been on the other side of the sign.

‘I’ll have a ham and cheese omelette,’ I said, which is as near to breakfast as you can get.

‘I’ll just have a white Americano,’ said Mr Reen. ‘I’m not giving them any more of my money if I can’t have a breakfast,’ he muttered as we made our way outside to find a seat.

Despite the blazing morning and the abundance of potential outdoor seating space overlooking the river, there were only about four benches so we had to share one with a father and his young daughter, who had been waiting for their food for a while and feared they had been forgotten. (It turned out they had.) They were remarkably sanguine while Mr Reen and I grumbled about how the Riverside Cafe wasn’t like it used to be, although, even then, under its previous management, it was pretty chaotic. At least they served breakfasts all day though.

On the plus side it’s heartening that this lovely spot on the banks of the River Lea hasn’t yet been snapped up by a load of hipsters wanting to charge you nine point five for a tiny portion of organic scrambled eggs on sourdough. The Riverside Cafe is a greasy spoon and prices are agreeably low.

My omelette arrived before our neighbours’ food and it was, I have to admit, very good. Generously proportioned with plenty of chips on the side, coleslaw and a fresh, if rather small, salad. Only five point five too. Mr Reen’s Americano was, in his words, ‘foul’. He suspected it was made from Lidl’s coffee. He watched me eat and then made me go up to Spark Cafe in Springfield Park (reviewed favourably elsewhere on this site), where I watched him eat a proper breakfast. He gave me a small bite of his sausage.

Big Jones, Chicago, USA

2014-07-30T10:50:00.001+01:00

Big Jones
5347 N Clark St., Chicago
773-275-5725
www.bigjoneschicago.com

by T. N. Toost

I found myself, on 5 July, breakfasting with a former Tokyo dominatrix, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion/stand-up comedian, and a prostitute.

I could have predicted breakfast with Natsuki and John; she has been my best friend since college, and it was natural that I’d want to meet her amazing new boyfriend. Having breakfast with an honest-to-God prostitute was something I never would have predicted. But the previous day, the Fourth of July, we’d all gone over to pick Nora up at her apartment – or, rather, one of her apartments, because she did business out of one and lived in the other. She called it the “HOstel.” She asked if we wanted to come up to see it, and, in reality, I didn’t, but I did anyway to be polite, and, in reality, I kind of did want to see it.

Prostitution is something that I intellectually believe should be decriminalized. People should be able to sell their services and their bodies in any way they wish, provided they don’t harm others and are not being exploited. Plus, to a certain extent, we all sell sex in some way; as Brendan Behan once quipped, the difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs less.

At the same time, I had a visceral negative reaction to being in a functioning brothel that I never would have anticipated. Standing in the living room of her work space, next to a strap-on dildo and variously sized paddles and two massive deer heads hanging on the wall, listening to a detailed account of how long it took to paint the 20-foot walls, and how the massage table only cost $150, and how they had to have a pile of new sponges for washing toys, and how they had elaborate plans to soundproof the rooms from the family living below them – standing there, I realized that my arms were tightly crossed in front of my body, and my mouth was drawn grimly against my teeth, and that I was very, very uncomfortable. I forced myself to uncross my arms and relax my face, and I listened, without comment, to a story about the fight she was having with her landlord to get a separate buzzer for her room so that her clients could be independently buzzed in and wouldn’t be seen by the clients of her partner.

Writing this, one week later, it strikes me that she is actually running her business pretty professionally – the only thing that gives it any salaciousness is the fact that society is so hung up on sex. She has to think about how to report her income, and securing business, and competition, and advertising, and government overreach, and land use issues, and overhead. She has databases to check whether potential clients are deadbeats, and online forums to discuss new business developments. When she goes out of town on business, she calls it being “on tour,” and she has to find places to work, new clients, and negotiate fees ahead of time to cover her travel expenses. And she thinks of little details, like filling her fridge with coconut water and cans of San Pellegrino. She didn’t say this, but I think she had San Pellegrino because of the foil cap on the cans that you peel back in order to sip it. It makes people like me feel less worried about drinking it; the foil acts as a condom, keeping germs from getting on the can and thus to my lips. I sipped it, delicately, as she told us that one of the persistent hazards of her work was sharting.

Prostitutes also pay close attention to their health. As she sat across the table from me that beautiful, clear Chicago morning, she was sweaty, after having biked 15 miles along the shores of Lake Michigan. When the food arrived, she had a huge plate of buckwheat pancakes topped with raspberries; they were gluten free, and she paired it with a Sazerac. I had “Eugene’s Breakfast in Mobile, circa 1930,” a dish inspired by a jazz musician who decided to become a chef. The catfish was delicious, the breading was light brown and flaky, the plantains and beans and rice were all seasoned perfectly. I washed it down with strong, black coffee.

And then there was the question of etiquette that might only come up when dining with a prostitute. I had no problem passing along a piece of catfish and plantains to her, but then she reciprocated. When she cut off a piece of pancake, placed a raspberry on top, and passed it onto my plate with her fork, I paused. She saw five clients a day, at times, and I thought of the dildo on the wall, and remembered how she had licked powdered sugar off of her fork as if it were a lollipop. That was the same fork that had speared the raspberry and the pancake and then had dropped both pieces of food onto my plate, on the edge, so it wouldn’t mix with my food. I swallowed hard for a second, considering how I might decline.

But I didn’t. She was my friend before she was a prostitute.

And her pancakes were, admittedly, delicious.

The Terrace Cafeteria at the House of Commons, Westminster

2014-07-22T12:00:00.000+01:00

The Terrace Cafeteria
House of Commons
Westminster
SW1A 0AA
(MPs, certain staff and their guests only)

by Marge E. Reen

Parliament is prorogued—ie on a break between one session and the next—and the MPs are, according to the press, ‘on holiday’ but actually they’re more likely to be in their constituencies worrying what to do about UKIP. It’s a May morning just after the local council elections and I take advantage of the calm by having a leisurely breakfast in my workplace. The Terrace Cafeteria is where I come most days for lunch but, as I don’t want to end up like Sir Nicholas Soames, I don’t usually breakfast here as well.

The Terrace is comfortingly old-fashioned with a Pugin-tiled serving area and a wood-panelled, green-carpeted dining room which overlooks the Thames. According to a friend who went to one, it’s like being in a boarding school refectory, and on this unseasonably rainy morning, I feel especially cosseted from the outside world. Modernisms have crept in—to my dismay they now have an electronic screen, which announces the menus of the day, but, for the most part, it’s as unchanging as Michael Fabricant’s hairdo.

At 10 am the Terrace is busy with burly builders, fat policemen and thin researchers. The canteen staff are, as ever, friendly and professional. Breakfast items sweat gently under a heat lamp on the serving counter. I take one rasher of bacon, one sausage, one hash brown and one spoon each of scrambled eggs, tinned tomatoes and mushrooms along with one small cup of filter coffee. All this comes to £3.60. An absolute bargain. It tastes good too. The scrambled eggs are creamy, the sausage herby and plump, the bacon entirely decent and the hash brown a slightly naff guilty pleasure. I do like the fact the tomatoes are tinned as fresh tomatoes can be so hard and tasteless. The mushrooms are a particular delight: unctuous with dark, savoury juices. After all this I feel ready to stride the corridors of power and look David Cameron straight in the eye should I bump into him, which of course I don’t.