Special Dispatch: Trenchard Lines Mess, Basra

Trenchard Lines Mess
Contingency Operating Base
Basra International Airport
Basra
Iraq

by Private Yolk

Amid the palette of hazy browns that perpetually blankets the home of British Forces in Iraq, there is a sole beacon of colour that cuts through the fuzz. Nestled between oversized sandbags and shaded under the giant arched sunshades lies our own Mesopotamian desert oasis: Trenchard Lines Mess.

Chef Omar and his team regularly serve up a veritable feast of traditional British delights. For the temporary ex-pats innovation is not the mot de jour when it comes to the most important meal of the day. Hash browns, pork sausages (!), bacon (!!), baked beans, eggs (the exact incarnation a daily revelation) and fried toast are always provided piping hot. Also, a choice of cereals that almost runs into double figures, brown and white bread (flanked by an industrial toaster that rivals the International Space Station in engineering complexity), fresh fruit and a tasteful choice of cold meats serve as a nod to the spreading breakfasting habits of those usually associated with the Officer Class.

Most crucially, the opening times have been carefully considered to accommodate the 24/7 lifestyle of those working on the base. Security prevents the divulging of exact details, but suffice to say shiftworkers, early risers, nightowls and those deciding to have a lie in are all catered for.

The decor is a combination of retro-chic, truck-stop functionality and the community of a school canteen. Simple but striking informative 'artwork' and a whiteboard of complexity rivalling an early Jackson Pollock break up the expanse of the jovial yellow walls, further complimented by the sumptuous ochre internal blast walls. Collectively, these features create an intimate atmosphere more befitting a 1950s American diner than a frontline mess hall.

Despite providing ample storage for body armour and personal weapons, the proprietors have provided a welcome relaxed atmosphere to those who are placing them around their tables. Indeed, the chance to examine your eating companions' kit provides as much of a welcome discussion opener as the large TV carrying the latest from the British Forces Broadcasting Service.

Sadly, like many British institutions, the future of the mess is under review. As the continual creep of Americanisation permeates the furthest flung corners of the globe, so too are we facing the potential that our Iraqi egg options will be replaced by 'sunny side up' and other such butchery of the English culinary lexicon. If Trenchard Mess is to be incorporated into a new monolithic 'welfare facility' then we can only hope space is allowed for our breakfast soldiers to continue to serve Queen and Country. Morale depends on it.

Toads Mouth Too, Brockley

Toads Mouth Too
188 Brockley Road
Brockley
SE4 2RN
020 8469 0043

by Holly N. Daise

Is it a restaurant? Is it a café? One thing is for sure: Toads Mouth Too is a labyrinth of disappointment.

Stretching to cater for all possible mealtime requirements, the menu doesn’t really cover any of them in much depth. Breakfast fare includes fruit, muesli and a selection of pastries, but for the full English enthusiast, the only option here is the ‘Full Toad’ (toast, eggs, 2 bacon, tomatoes, mushrooms, beans and choice of Cumberland sausage or chorizo).

If you enjoy the customisable aspect of your breakfast, then you may be frustrated by the occasional rigidity here. Poached egg appears to be beyond the ability of the chef, as is making small exceptions for individuality of taste. You can try asking them to swap various features, but this usually receives a despondent reaction.

On this occasion, I ordered the Full Toad and enquired about the possibility of swapping the mushrooms for a hash brown (a feature of the vegetarian equivalent). To my surprise this was agreed to with little resistance as my order was pecked into a handheld computerised gadget by the joyless waiter. Two clues into the Sunday crossword, I overheard a man on an adjacent table also asking for a mushroom/ hash brown swap, only to be told, “I can ask the chef, but I can’t guarantee he’ll do it.”

What is it exactly the chef finds so erratically difficult about spooning a hash brown onto a plate instead of some mushrooms?

Interrupting thoughts like this my food arrived and was a major letdown. Everything on the plate appeared to be swimming in a soup of tepid beans, the portion of chorizo was miserably small and the two pieces of bacon were welded together in an impenetrable embrace. For an order costing nearly £10 it was pretty dismal.

It’s a shame that the breakfast here is always so disappointing because the place itself has a lot of potential. There’s an assortment of charming subterranean rooms ornamented with original art and a surprisingly peaceful garden. These attractions plus the homemade cakes and excellent coffee could make it still worth a visit, if you’re in Brockley and that’s what you want.

Café Mozart, Highgate

Café Mozart
17 Swains Lane
Highgate
N6 6QX
020 8348 1384

By Cher E. Jamm

There is nothing like a bit of alfresco breakfasting at this time of year. When it’s not pouring with rain, the birds are a tweetin’, cherry blossoms are a bloomin’ and the sun has a way of shining down on your plate like a proud chef watching over your shoulder as you eat.

Café Mozart is a popular North London breakfast spot. The décor, supposedly modelled on a traditional Austrian kaffee house, is a tad gloomy and depressing – all dark wood panelling and (of course) a few Mozart manuscripts dotted around casually, jostling with other vaguely Austrian relics in various forms. It has its charms, but after more than five minutes inside the atmosphere becomes strangely suffocating.

The good news is this: they have a big outdoor dining area at the front, it’s a mere shimmy to Hampstead Heath and the staff are friendly and efficient – within moments of sitting outside, a cheery waitress delivers a couple of menus and a jug of water and takes our drinks order. Oh, and the cake counter will have your saliva glands doing the hula if you stare at it for too long.

Tea is served with the bag in and the milk in a small jug at its side. Orange juice is fresh, lovely and cold. We order. I’m having the Veggie breakfast and I make Mr Jamm order the Full English. We are given the choice of how we’d like our eggs and what type of bread we’d like. I go for granary and Mr Jamm goes for rye. A side of spinach and sautéed potatoes is also thrown into the mix. 10 minutes later and our breakfast arrives - both dishes are plentiful, hot and I’m happy to say, the bacon is delightfully crispy.

I’m afraid that’s all I can remember. I’ve tried to recall what the eggs were like, and I know the vegetarian ‘sausage’ was hideous, dry and a bit like chewing on a rolled up towel, but I’m afraid my tastebuds went into a boredom-induced coma at some stage after the second bite. What I can tell you is this: I won’t be coming back unless it’s for tea and cake.

Tom's Kitchen, Chelsea

Tom’s Kitchen
27 Cale Street
Chelsea
SW3 3QP
020 7349 0202

by Duncan Soldiers

The back streets of Chelsea are rarely on the radar when it comes to searching for the perfect breakfast – local residents not being ones for sausage, egg and chips, unless the Atkins diet happens to be back in fashion that particular week.

However, one new arrival who seems to be hauling the yummy mummies out of their carbon copy King’s Road coffee shops is Tom Aitken and his trendy farmhouse kitchen. Goodbye, ladies who lunch; hello, ladies who breakfast.

The cutlery in Tom’s is ‘try-hard’ cool - lots of odd shaped glasses and retro cups that make you think you’re going to spill your tea, and then make you spill your tea. This is the antithesis of the greasy spoon – hence no builders’ mugs the size of waste paper bins here.

First of all, I plumped for the porridge with brown sugar (slow release carbs apparently – good for the waistline and all that). The bowl arrived - a huge, great portion and at £3 surely the most reasonably priced dish in Chelsea. It was thick, steamy and gluppy – perfect pre-shopping fare. My partner in breakfasts went for the half grapefruit – which apart from being already cut up for you (don’t be silly; Chelsea Sloanes don’t cut their own fruit) did exactly what it said on the tin. It was fresh, juicy and tart.

After my affair with the porridge, I felt it would be rude not to try their take on the full English: mushroom, tomato, sausage, black pudding (a lovely, meaty, fatty, angina-inducing treat), fried eggs, bacon, and beans served in a separate dish, all delivered on a thick wooden platter. You don’t get that at your local greasy spoon, but from now on that’s how I’m ordering it.

My only gripe would be that the food was ever so slightly cold, but I presume that’s because the place was rammed to the rafters (we waited 10 minutes for a table). In future I’ll book. Still, at £30 for two, I expected it to be hot, no matter how busy they were.

Op-Egg: Giles Coren is Being a Bit Daft

by Nelson Griddle

To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, it seems that one Englishman has only to open his mouth and put a sausage in it for another Englishman to despise him.

For proof, look no further than Times man Giles Coren, who, not content with going about Pontefract telling truck drivers what they should and should not be eating for a TV documentary called Tax the Fat (sounds like highly nuanced stuff, eh?), has made a sally against the English breakfast.

“You never see a person with a degree eating a fry-up, do you?” argues Mr Coren. “Certainly not someone with a 2:1 or better in a humanities subject from a university founded before the invention of the iPod. That's because they are smart enough to know better.”

Only stupid people eat a Full English, according to Mr Coren. Oh, and working class people, too. Wealthy young Giles, whose father sent him to Westminster (where it seems they taught him that it’s amusing to poke fun at people on Disability Living Allowance) prefers porridge with… wait for it… salt.

LRB readers can make their own minds on whether they wish to swap their eggs and bacon for salty oatmeal. And whether they only plump for the former only because they’re dim-witted white trash.

My own contention would be twofold: that the cerebral can coexist happily with the calorific. And The Times is not what it was.

Special Dispatch: Gospel Brunch at the House of Blues, Cleveland

Gospel Brunch at the House of Blues
308 Euclid Ave
Cleveland, OH 44114
Ohio
USA
+1 (216) 523-2583
www.hob.com

by T. N. Toost

In retrospect, I made too many assumptions. First, what is a gospel brunch? I didn’t know; I just assumed it was a brunch with gospel music. It's like asking for a definition of a fat girl, or pornography, or the perfect fried egg: you know it when you see it, but how do you define it without using subjective adjectives? I don’t feel bad, though: people rely on assumptions, on stereotypes; it’s how we can quickly process massive amounts of information.

First bad assumption: there would be more black people. Reality: with an African great-great-grandmother, I was clearly the blackest patron. Everyone else was white, lily-white, glow-in-the-dark white, with the exception of a few Japanese tourists and a sole black waiter. I wasn’t sure if everyone else was disappointed or not.

Second bad assumption: the food would be amazing. Over three trips to the buffet I had crawfish cheesecake, biscuits and gravy, fried chicken legs, bacon, sausages, a stuffed tomato, scrambled eggs, jambalaya, fried potatoes, a rosemary cornbread muffin with maple butter, pineapple, Tuscan melon, blackberries and blueberries, pecan sticky loaf, apple cobbler, pecan pie and white chocolate banana pudding with crème anglais. With the exception of the muffin, the fruit and the pudding, it was all mediocre, if not downright bad (I’m looking at you, fried chicken); the exceptions, though, were absolutely incredible. The muffin was hot, soft and buttery; the fruit fresh and the pudding sweet and yielding. As I understand it, this pudding was a staple on the plantations; the weak mimosas and strong coffee were just like Remus might have made them.

After our enormous eating session, the Jesus music stopped playing and the incongruous video screen showing Bjork videos rolled up. The band started – four men in matching 4-button chalkstripe suits, and the hostess, a full-bodied black woman in a black velvet gown. She sang “Ain’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus” and, with the thrust in her hips, we wondered how well she knew the Savior. “Take Me Lord” likewise did nothing for her reputation.

Everyone in the audience was clapping along, waving napkins, singing on cue with the band. When the hostess said stand, clap or sing, we stood, clapped and sang. It was an opportunity to get black acceptance and even encouragement without being threatened by their inherent cultural hegemony. There is anti-black sentiment in America, but I suspect anti-white sentiment is even more prevalent in black culture. The gospel brunch, like a pair of fishbowls on a table, allowed each group to see each other with only minor refractions and distortions. It was more a performance than a prayer.

Café Rossi, Borough

Café Rossi
57 Borough High Street,
Borough
London
SE1 1NE
020 7407 3718

by Molly Coddle-Degg

We trekked through London Bridge in search of shelter and nourishment. It was snowing. In April! Numerous menus tacked outside various restaurants had left us uninspired. How we were hungry. Desperately so, I realised, as we defaulted, zombie-like, into Slug and Lettuce. We stood inside, feeling sad, craving sausages, beans, eggcetera. There was no attempt to remove outerwear and sit down. We didn’t want to be in a chain pub considering the food options. This wasn’t how it was meant to be.

A handwritten sandwich board, noticed through a window. Did it really say ‘All Day Breakfast’? It did! Cue palpable joy and a hasty retreat.

Café Rossi. Busily peopled by trendies, builders, and trendy builders. Formica décor, green mismatched chairs, the specials proclaimed in biro, presided over by Signor Rossi*. If you look up ‘Mediterranean patriarch slash café owner’ on Wikipedia, it’s his picture that appears, at the time of writing.

Traditional Breakfast: two eggs, two bacon, sausage, chips, beans, mushrooms or tomato, tea or coffee. £4.50. Sold!

Though Signor was upset by an attempt to order food and drink in one go (“First food! Then drink” he roared), the rest was plain sailing. Jules was allowed both mushrooms AND tomato (“It’s two of my five a day!”), Vix able to substitute hash browns for chips.

“How was it?” Signor demanded as he took our plates. “Great!” we truthfully revealed – for it was. Every last breakfast item had been blessed by the greasy spoon and consumed with relish. Signor was then distracted by a Globe brochure. “Shakespeare!” he sneered. “I no like. Too tragedy. I prefer happy news! YouTube and MySpace!”

So, we invited Signor Rossi to come and see the Merry Wives of Windsor. He is still thinking about it.

*perhaps. Hopefully.

Op-Egg: Solving the breakfast class divide

by Blake Pudding

In Britain we have a problem with breakfasts. In fact, we have a problem with food in general and like a lot of problems in this country it boils down to class. I speak of the great divide between the caff and the café. In the caff you will be served enormous quantities of not very good quality food quickly and with no pretension or fuss. In the café, there may be a mission statement, there may be a picture of Nicaraguan peasants' children dancing happily because their parents have got a good price for their coffee, there may well be a family tree showing the lineage of the pork products. This will all be a mask to hide the fact that they don’t really know what they are doing. The service will be terrible, the sausages will be over-cooked and the eggs will be under-cooked. In places like this, I look at the quality of the ingredients and weep at the waste and weep at the bill too which normally tops £7 for a full English. Complaining is pointless because all the staff are part-time and most of them are as hungover as the clientele.

What they lack is discipline!

Back at the caff, a stern patriarch (probably called Nico and of Greek Cypriot origin), will be conducting his kitchen in a symphony of steam and hissing fat. Your food will arrive miraculously quickly and will be exactly how you ordered it. The problem comes when you start to think about where your food comes from. Those peculiar brown/ grey bangers are fine for the lower orders who have never tasted better but once you have tried a proper sausage then you will not want to go back.

What’s to be done? I would love to see a reality TV show where Nico is sent into one of these organic rip-off joints to put the fear of God into the pretty fey staff. That would make excellent television and probably very good breakfast. Alternatively greasy spoons caffs could offer a better class of sausage and bacon alongside the traditional tat. In a masterstroke the decline of the caff would be halted. You would have the best of both worlds, the caff and the café. The middle class would eat roughly the same food on the same premises as working class. It could spell the end of the class conflict that has plagued England since the Norman Conquest.

Le Chandelier, East Dulwich

Le Chandelier
161 Lordship Lane
East Dulwich
SE22 8HX
020 8299 3344

by Malcolm Eggs

"Would you like your bacon soft or crispy?"

The waitress at Le Chandelier has just asked me this question and it sets me thinking. What if I meet a genie today and he instructs me that I must decide whether to give up bacon or steak for the rest of my life? I don’t think I would hesitate. I love that "to hell with sausage and mash, to hell with barbary duck" moment when I order steak. But lose bacon? It'd never work. When I was younger, I‘d take an eight-rasher pack and grill it all for a single sandwich. No sauce; sometimes not even an egg. I would miss steak, but wouldn't pine for it, not in the same way. But then... What if the little genie – he looks like a tiny, green-haired Peter Kay – is tricking me, and actually I have just expunged juicy steak only to get soft bacon for all my living days? Cruel, cheeky genie. Crispy and soft are completely different foods, far less alike than rare and well-done steak. Which brings me full circle to:

"Crispy."

Her question - so welcome, so criminally rare – renders me unable to criticise anything. The tinny music emanating from the kitchen is endearing. The unbuttered toast is better that way. The scrambled eggs are perfect. The décor is flawless. The toilet is well signposted. And to be fair, in general, it is lovely. Mabel Syrup’s eggs benedict is wonderful and generous, the eggs poached to perfection and the hollandaise finished off with an interesting method involving grilling the top until it browns slightly. It works well. My bacon and scrambled eggs aren’t going to win any major awards, but they are just fine. And the cakes and loaves of bread stacked up at the counter look incredible.

We emerge into the winter and get into the car. I resolve to eat steak the next time I get the chance – it being prudent to make the most of it, just in case.

Leila's Shop, Shoreditch

Leila’s Shop
17 Calvert Avenue
Shoreditch
E2 7JP
020 7729 9789

by Dieggo Rivera

I can point out Leila’s on a map and describe the things you’ll find there – baskets of vegetables and shelves stocking books, preserves, dried ceps – but it’s harder to explain exactly what it is. At first glance, it’s like a group of friends gathered in a kitchen, whose door was accidentally left ajar.

Similarly, the tins and jars lined along the wall appear to be food friends who share an affectionate connection, rather than getting bogged down in all the usual food prejudices and cliques which stipulate, for instance, that egg and bacon always appear together at breakfast time, that spaghetti belongs to the Italian food sector and that all organic food must be marked with a squiggly font.

Now, although there are tables and Leila’s serves food, to compare it to a regular café is to miss the point. Leila’s shop is a little alcove, carefully whittled out from the food massif, with a succinct menu offering simply eggs, a cheese sandwich or a polish platter of sausages, pickles, horseradish and rye. That’s it.

My companion, who confuses service with subservience, is to the waitress as the tax collector was to Jesus. But her requests for soya milk and mayonnaise on her comté sandwich are refused. You can find comfort in a place like this, where rebellion is futile: succumb to Leila for she knows best and be grateful for relief from the endlessness of choice.

I sit around a long table and watch as my eggs languish in a hot fist of butter then make their way over to the table, snug in their still-sizzling cast-iron pan. They taste like being in love with your husband or wife.

While my post-prandial companion busies herself with complex mathematical comparisons between our bill and what it would have cost to buy the individual ingredients at Tesco, I look up and glimpse, for an instant, something of the meaning of life in a waitress, a gently-tarnished silver spoon and a jug of milk, as she stops beside the espresso machine, bends down and scoops a thick and goopy layer of cream from its meniscus.