Mike's Cafe, Notting Hill

Mike's Cafe
12 Blenheim Crescent
Notting Hill
W11 1NN
020 7229 3757

by Cathy Latte

Breakfasts in my grubby Stockport flat were never destined for greatness. But they were made all the more cheery by visits from Karen, my unofficial housemate at the time. Of a weekend we’d unsuccessfully try to quell the reek of rising mercury and the sound of sobbing kids wafting up from the dentist’s below with our enthusiastic porcine creations.

Eight years on, having long since left Stockport, Karen and I found ourselves in Mike’s Café. Established in 1962 it’s an honest little place with an unpretentious air, a welcome change from the soulless West London nonsense on offer nearby. Daft paintings dangle haphazardly against incongruous yellow walls; snuggly little booths and inviting tables fill the waiting floor.

‘Good quality food is delivered to your table in a quick and friendly manner’ says the menu – but they needn’t have been so modest. Our ‘Breakfast Specials‘ were made with confidence and gusto. Our eggs were blessed with a yolky-dokey divinity, the bacon with textural perfection, the fresh-from-the-market tomatoes burst juicily and the newly freed beans spilled over our plates unreservedly. If there were to be a smudge on an otherwise brilliantly white tablecloth then I’d have to point my finger at the sausage. They weren’t bad, but they weren’t the hearty herby offer I’d have hoped for, though this is probably why they can pull off an otherwise marvellous Special for £5.50.

Still, we loved it. We lolled in our seats guzzling wine (yes they sell booze with breakfasts all day long) laughing about bygone Stockport days. We smiled at the waiters zipping by and they smiled back, and we didn’t mind the little wait for our bill when after 2 hours we’d had our fill because well, we didn’t really want to leave.

Bar Solo, Camden

Bar Solo
20 Inverness Street
Camden Town
NW1 7HJ
020 7482 4611
www.solobar.co.uk

by Corin Flakes

Off the shuddering thoroughfare of Camden High Street, peacefully withdrawn from its sardined caste of anaemic teen and mumbling nomad, sits Bar Solo – apparently voted by Time Out readers as the best destination for breakfast in London. Naturally, such a populist triumph demands the objective rigor of the LRB.

Seated by beaming staff (who, you are made to feel, understand the laconic entrapments of a grave hangover) Ed Benedict and I submerged ourselves in a confident menu – simple, but with progressive twists on accepted convention. Service was buoyant, swift, assured; mushrooms were cheerily debated, and egg requests accommodated with the nodding elasticity of the expert. Benedict favoured the Veggie, I the eponymous Solo.

The Veggie drew unmitigated shock. The puritanical elements were adeptly accounted for (vegetarian sausage, quality beans, crisp toast) but the plate was dominated by an experimental plume of creamed spinach. Lacking genealogical connection to the fry-up family, spinach can’t be ignored - it ruptures the entire ecology of the dish with the steaming mania of an ungovernable step-child. Though the poached eggs were perfectly robust, contamination was irreversible: the breakfast a lumpish reservoir of lurid green.

Safe from reckless pioneering, the Solo was near flawless for an economical £4.95. The bacon was muscular, the sausages possessed the right extraction of herb and flesh, and a saporific tomato had been assiduously grilled. My single dissatisfaction was that the mushrooms, although cooked with evident love, were depressingly sparse: a meek triumvirate of lonesome fungi.

I’d timidly agree with the Time Out Readership, but with a strict amendment – the best breakfast in London (for the price, if you avoid the greenery, if you are on Inverness St).

The Blue Legume, Stoke Newington

The Blue Legume
101 Stoke Newington Church Street
Stoke Newington
N16 0UD
020 7923 1303

by H.P. Seuss

Landlord! Thinkst me a vagabond that thou wouldst have me beg for bacon? Thou'lt beg my pardon! Thinkst me a donkey that thou wouldst fill my trough with compost? I'll make an ass of thee! And thinkst me a honeybee that thou wouldst make me hunt for yolk like the sole daisy in fifty acres of grass? Buzz off!

Funny how you only think of what you wanted to say after the moment has passed. Eloquence escaped me for the ever-thronging Blue Legume had thrice vexed me.

For one, their Cumberland Breakfast did not come with bacon; I had to pay extra for this essential component to join the eponymous sausage. For two, the vegetables were too abundant, making the latter stages of consumption
monotonously meatless. For three, the poached egg arrived floundering in a field of salad (salad!), assailed by lemon dressing which further threatened the beans. I had immediately to prepare a life-raft of toast and airlift the sorry vessel away.

That The Blue Legume should have such a veg-centric philosophy might be gleaned from its name, or indeed the preponderance of wholegrain mothers treating their free-range children to granola pies. Indeed, I had prepared
myself for meat-denial, and but for my need for something more substantial would have ordered the delicious-looking pancakes with fresh fruit.

However, on dipping the virile, honeyed bacon into the exuberant, amber yolk of the egg, my consternation turned to astonishment. This was one of the finest egg/bacon duets I have ever experienced horribly compromised, like Nureyev and Fonteyn dancing a pas de deux in a village pilates class.

Landlords! Take heed! However fresh your fruit and yummy your mummies, if breakfast ye serve, forget ye not the primacy of the bacon and the primacy of the egg.

Moomba World Café, Putney

Moomba Word Café
5 Lacey Road
Putney
SW15 1NH
020 8785 9151
www.moomba.co.uk

by Blake Pudding

It was the name that filled me with horror- Moomba World Café. It conjured up images of earnest New Zealanders worrying about whether it was ethical to listen to Paul Simon - and awful, awful food. No, my breakfast companions insisted, this was the place to go for breakfast in Putney. I was with the beautiful Wingate sisters, Alice and Emily, the granddaughters of legendary Second World War maverick General Orde Wingate. Orde was the man who founded the Israeli Army, reinstated Haile Selaisse on the throne of Ethiopia and expelled the Japanese from Burma so perhaps a “world” café was appropriate.

The food was good too. My full English came in at £7.65 but was worth almost every penny. It came with the usual stuff, all of high quality and well cooked, but also an item which appeared to be a hybrid of bubble and squeak and a hash brown. It was unusual but great for mopping up excess HP sauce. The service worked with military precision. We ordered and scarcely had time to say “Lion of Judah” before a delicious meal was there in front of our eyes. I should add that the eggs Benedict was a little disappointing with runny hollandaise and overcooked eggs but I, with my magnificent full English, did not really care.

At the Moomba World Café one finds the perfect meeting of the café and the caff cultures- the very good ingredients of the café combined with the utter professionalism of the caff.

Rock Steady Eddie's, Camberwell

Rock Steady Eddie's
2A Coldharbour Lane
Camberwell
SE5 9PR

by Herby Banger

8am, Kings College Hospital Dental Unit. I’m told that this could take some time. Luckily I’m just there for support, which means as my girlfriend disappears reluctantly through yet more unmarked swing doors I have time to kill in Camberwell.

I know where I’m headed; I’ve driven past it too many times not for it to be embedded in the back of my mind. Rock Steady Eddie's Café, the most garish looking spoon in the area. Outside it’s a glitzy overbearing sign and inside it’s traditional Formica tables and high backed booth style seats, overlooked by rock 'n’ roll and Hollywood posters. Everything however seems faded and saddened by grease and neglect.

I sit and read the menu which lists the endless dining options on offer. Eddie's tailors for breakfast, lunch and dinner - yet on closer scrutiny there seems to be no discernable difference between any of them, unless 'Onion Rings' constitutes the difference.

Fearing a possible stroke I opt for poached eggs on toast, bacon, beans and bubble. It comes and then it goes; the kind of breakfast that you try to eat as quickly as humanly possible just to get rid of it. Not that it's particularly bad, but its unremarkableness makes its ordinariness stand out.

Dirty, yet cheap, Eddie's has an edge about it even on this early Monday morning. The clientele seem to be the abject poor, and the clearly crazy. Like most people in Eddie's, it seemed that no one intended to wind up there, just circumstances had collided and Fortuna’s wheel had spun them downwards and here they are. That being said Eddie's is a constant, a reliable and maybe the only permanent fixture for people in this area, and for them it serves much more than its feeble £3.85 breakfast.

Puccino's, Surbiton

Puccino's
6 Victoria Road
Surbiton
KT6 4JU
020 8390 9193
www.puccinos.com

by H.P. Seuss

I awoke in Surbiton.

It is not a sentence one utters with pride. In fact, it is not a sentence I would wish on anyone. But there it is: I awoke in Surbiton, after a so-so-biton party in the suburbiton semi of some Surbiton acquaintances.

It may look like any other patch of suburbia, but there's something about Surbiton, a delicate tyranny, an inoffensive apocalypse that gives me the willies. I was in a hurry to leave, but given the impending trek North-Eastwards, my companions and I opted to fortify ourselves with a decent breakfast. We alighted on a brightly innocuous place called Puccino's, part of an expanding chain.

For £4.95 I enjoyed a double full English, which happily dispatched with my burgeoning hangover. I felt slightly cheated by the sausages, which were split in half to be cooked in a panini press, but the core bacon and eggs, and vegetable constituents were perfectly agreeable.

Most striking about Puccino's though, was its customer interface (to use the sort of term that I'm sure was bandied around the boardroom where the idea was spawned). Their packaging comes emblazoned with such legends as "pointless biscuit", "crappy chocolate" and "rubbish flapjack", while the wall displays and menus abound with such defensive self-deprecation. I
found it all rather distasteful, a feeling which increased when I logged on to their website to find that Puccino's is the largest coffee franchise in the UK. Presumably these sinister stabs at humour are an attempt to soften the image of a company which must have squeezed dozens of genuinely characterful cafes out of business.

As our train trundled towards Waterloo, my tongue teasing a scrap of bacon from my teeth, I shuddered. Sly and serviceable, Puccino's is the epitome of the Surbitonisation of the English breakfast, a trend which should be resisted in all its forms.

Smallfish, Shoreditch

***SMALLFISH HAS NOW CLOSED. SEE THE GROCERY***

Smallfish
372 Old St
Shoreditch
EC1V
020 7739 2252
www.smallfish.co.uk

by Malcolm Eggs

A couple of weeks ago I was completely unable to stop listening to a song called ‘Black Cab’ – a sad, lolloping ode to weary drunken transport by a Swedish singer named Jens Lekman. Cathy Latte has been similarly afflicted, so we decided to spend part of a Friday morning seeking out his back catalogue at Smallfish Records. We arranged to meet in the basement café.

I arrived first and ordered a bacon and egg sandwich (asking that my bacon be crispy) then sat at a table and looked through a newspaper. The absence of music gave the room a strangely tranquil atmosphere, for a record shop. Something about it was reminiscent of a student common room at daybreak, perhaps the fact that the only other customer was wearing a beanie and frowning over a Japanese fanzine. Cathy soon turned up. She decided on a health-drenched dish involving raspberries, granola and natural yoghurt.

I didn’t expect much, this being primarily a place of vinyl, plastic and thumbs. I certainly didn’t expect over a week later to still be thinking about the sandwich from time to time, about how the bread was so fresh, so thick, so crusty, so tasty; how the bacon was generous and cooked to a wonderful dark scarlet as if plucked directly from my imagination; and how the eggs detonated across all of the aforementioned as if fulfilling some Tiresian prophesy. I didn’t expect that at all. It’s made me forget about ‘Black Cab’ entirely.

The Gatehouse, Highgate

The Gatehouse
1 North Road
Highgate
N6 6DB
020 8340 8054

by Hamish Pastry

When tequila-based excess and longstanding family commitments meet head on, things can get messy. So it was that I found myself sprinting for the Highgate-bound 271, half an hour late for breakfast with Aunt Libby.

I was headed for The Gatehouse, a 14th century coaching inn with a theatre upstairs. So far, so Highgate. But step inside and witness the motley crew of boozing pensioners and the rock-bottom prices and one thing soon becomes clear – you’re in a Wetherspoon's.

Personally, I’m a fan of these places. It’s comforting to know there’s somewhere you can get an honestly priced drink in London. The accompanying bar meals however, aren’t exactly gastro. So what sort of breakfasting experience would this be?

Well… it wasn’t half bad. I relayed my order to Aunt Lib from the bus, plumping for the ‘farmhouse breakfast’, which is essentially a double ‘traditional breakfast’. Eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, hash browns, tomato and a large flat mushroom.

By the time I arrived it was already waiting for me, disappointingly minus the mushroom (all out). This was made up for with extra beans and tasty griddled bacon. The eggs were unexpectedly free-range and the toast a pleasant treat – thick-sliced bloomer with poppy seeds. The only real downside was the nasty triangular hash browns (of the Iceland variety). But what really sets this breakfast apart is the price – just £3.69 for the farmhouse and a frankly ridiculous £2.49 for traditional or veggie.

Afterwards, as I stepped out into the crisp February sunshine, one elderly barfly broke into a chorus of ‘Jingle Bells’. A fittingly incongruous end to a breakfast not short of surprises.

The Waiting Rooms, Palmers Green

The Waiting Rooms
Palmers Green Station
Aldermans Hill
Palmers Green
N13 4PN
020 8886 7781

by Poppy Tartt

The Waiting Rooms café bar is ever so slightly cool. This fact is ever so slightly baffling, given its location - but maybe the grittier side of surburbia is only too apt a backdrop for this curiosity, a café bar attached to a railway station offering live music by night and fried breakfasts by morning.

On this particular morning, the breakfast was some time in coming, rather more time than might be strictly desirable, but I think there may have been only two stressed but admirably cheerful ladies behind both the cooking and serving, so they may be forgiven. My companion and I opted for the Big Breakfast - eggs, sausage, bacon, beans, two hash browns, and toast, though I forwent the beans. To my mind the egg is the most vulnerable and most important member of the breakfast platter, whose purity must be protected at any price by an army of meats and breads; the egg must never - but never - come into contact with tomato.

These eggs came scrambled (I had forgotten to ask for fried), the sausage short, fragrant, and remarkably dense. My companion had assured me that on a previous occasion he had been indulged with a sausage of at least twice its length, which left our expectations a little dashed, but the sausage, in its own right, was a success, perhaps because its previous length had been crammed into its breadth. The eggs, too, were surprisingly good, buoyant but not squeaky, with absolutely no liquid surplus; the bacon golden pink and the hash browns golden brown. The only disappointment was a late side order of grilled halloumi that never arrived, but in the end, all things considered, and eaten, it was probably for the best.

The Green, Islington

The Green
74 Upper Street
Islington
N1 0NY
020 7226 8895
www.the-green.co.uk

by Hamish Pastry

“The Green isn’t just a new venue; it’s a completely new type of bar-restaurant.” So reads the lofty claim on its swish website. In fact, the Green has been open for over a year. Which by most standards isn’t quite new, and by Upper Street’s standards constitutes a lifetime. Blink and you’ll miss a bar-restaurant round here.

That aside, the Green does come at things from a slightly different angle. It’s a gay bar you see, but a gay bar that dispenses with any anti-hetero vibes and welcomes friends of either sex and any sexuality. A place to be seen rather than scene, if you will.

It also serves a rather nice weekend brunch. We were drawn in by the promise of half-price Bloody Marys. I love a Mary at the best of times and at under £3 a pop at this time on a Sunday morning I could marry one. Very good they were too, mixed to perfection and complete with horseradish and a fat celery stick.

The menu was a classy affair, which sadly put the Full English out of my price range at a whopping £8.50. I opted instead for Green Eggs at a more modest £6.50. Four juicy spears of asparagus promptly arrived resting on wedges of wholemeal toast, topped with a large pair of poached eggs and a glossy splash of hollandaise. It was clearly cooked with care, the asparagus being suitably al dente and the egg yolks marvellously fluid.

Special mention must go to our extraordinarily perky and helpful waiter. Sundays in the Green are known as Slack Sabbath, but this boy was no slacker.

Special Dispatch: Daiwa Sushi, Tsukiji Fish Market, Tokyo

Daiwa Sushi
5-2-1 Tsukiji
Central Ward 6
Tsukiji Fish Market
Tokyo
Japan
03-3547-6807
www.tsukiji-market.or.jp/youkoso/welcom_e.htm

by Hashley Brown on location

Very few great breakfasts start at 4:30am, but the sleep sacrifice required to dine in the world’s greatest fish market is nothing when compared to the sublime gastronomic event that shortly follows.

A teeming fishy empire that grinds awake at 3am to grade and trade arguably the greatest fish in the sea, the tuna, is a fish lover's paradise. Men wielding 6 foot knives carve huges sides of fat marbled yellowfin amidst a veritable cornucopia of octopus and squid. Foot long clams jostle for space with piles of still wriggling prawns and mountains of fish roe, whilst all around the rest of the undersea world is haggled and sold.

It is amidst the briny turmoil that those who come to shop and look can feast on the freshest sushi breakfast imaginable. Surrounding the market innumerable restaurants take the fruit of the sea and transform it from its flapping primal state into the delicate form that is sushi. From amidst the sea of restaurants a few stand out – those marked by the queues of people waiting from 5am in the sharp New Year air for a taste of what’s inside.

And so after an hour in the cold, with expectations growing after every queuing minute, we arrive at the counter of Daiwa Sushi. ¥3000 (£15) buys the house set menu and so begins a flurry of activity, as hot green tea and miso soup with tiny clams are brought to the counter at which we sit. From behind this counter chefs craft gems that are eaten by hand from a wooden shelf, accompanied by a rosy pile of pickled ginger. And what a feast! Nigiri of Toro (fatty tuna), Buri (yellowtail), Uni (sea urchin) and Anago (grilled eel) each take their turn as do Maguro maki (tuna roll) and Ika (squid) - small mounds of rice topped with sumptuous cuts of fish as fresh as the hour they were pulled from the sea.

Unlike any other meal of the day this breakfast is imbued with magic. As the furore of the market roars on and the queues outside grow longer, from the peace of the sushi counter comes the realisation that no other breakfast can quite compare.

DK's Cafe, Victoria

DK's Café
68 Wilton Rd
Victoria
SW1V 1DE
020 7963 0981

by Gracie Spoon

Victoria Station: nemesis of the Southbound. It seems such a shame to have anything good to say about it or its 500-metre radius. But the thing is, I found a café, had a breakfast and lucked upon a merciful cocoon from the Victoria reality, as not one single frustrating, overpriced or incompetent thing even tried to happen.

Featuring a mirrored wall, a windowed wall and a sudden, dense forest of wooden tables, DK's on Wilton Rd has the air of a stereotypical French bar, except the ashtrays were clean and so were the floor and the staff. My veggie all-dayer (£5 including tea or coffee: special offer on a weekday) was to be praised for many reasons: perhaps most notably for the fact that it didn’t resort to fake meat to make up the numbers, instead piling on pleasingly crispy hash browns and potato wedges amongst the usual eggs, toast and tomatoes. As an ensemble, the breakfasts favoured taste over slime: our eggs were a lightweight joy and my whole grilled tomato was a vibrant advertisement for the 5-a-day campaign. The good-looking Eggs Benedict (£5) was rightfully generous with the hollandaise and, more controversially, with the ham. Although my companion was mildly perturbed by what he felt was a superfluity of meat, a reaction like this may well depend on your tastes and overall ham threshold. Special mention to the drinks, as the apple juice was unexpectedly freshly squeezed, and the coffee was a pleasure: strong but slow, unlike the thin sloppy mugfuls of angst I’m used to paying out for.

DKs served us an unpretentiously priced breakfast with just enough of the ponce to keep everything the right side of clean, fresh and tasty. Move the station north a bit, and I’ll happily go back.