Cafe Solo, Crouch End

Cafe Solo
59 The Broadway
Crouch End
N8 8DT (Map)
020 83478861

by Stephen Fry-Up

I had spent the first half of the previous evening at London’s cavernous Alexandra Palace, clad entirely in black and rhythmically shuffling along to moody old Interpol. Some time later, I found myself in somebody’s house somewhere near Wood Green, having passed a full 45 minutes sleep on a small rickety stool. I decided to beat a hasty retreat, and, feeling very much confused, but in an inexplicably joyful way, I wended my way upon foot and upon bus down to Crouch End.

There, I called on my ex-flat-mate, ‘The Toaster’, and we set out for his favourite Crouch eatery, Cafe Solo. During my Crouch days, I ate once at Solo’s and it was diabolical, but the Toaster was adamant that it had been but a blip and that Solo’s was back to its best. Now, the Toaster is a man who knows his food, so if he says something is good, then it most probably is. Nonetheless it was with some trepidation that I went (as Blake Pudding likes to term it) “off-piste”, and ordered hash-brown, black pudding, bacon, eggs, mushrooms, and beans. However I am pleased to report that every item was utterly delicious: the black pudding was rich and sticky, the eggs were flawless, and the hash-browns were crispy golden oniony heaven.

Solo’s is basically the perfect breakfast destination: it’s friendly, family run, and the service is great. It doesn’t wank on about food provenance, which, frankly, is hard enough to bear in the evening, let alone at breakfast. And yet it is far superior to any ‘greasy spoon’ that I have patronised hitherto. Quite simply, if you live anywhere near Crouch End, you should, like The Toaster, eat at Cafe Solo daily. And if not, well, I know of a lovely two bed flat for rent…

Soup + Salad, Spitalfields

****THIS RESTAURANT HAS CLOSED DOWN BUT THE REVIEW IS STILL AMUSING IF YOU LIKE THAT KIND OF THING****

Soup + Salad
28 - 36 Brushfield St
Spitalfields E1 6AG (Map)
020 7377 5756
www.soupandsalad.co.uk

by Malcolm Eggs

What is soup? Is it a liquid food, or just a food that is neither solid nor gas (I refer you to a dense bowl of winter vegetable)? Is it a pioneering, post-sandwich lunchstuff, or a primitive mirror in which we see the dieting fads of a time (see the non stop forage-pots of the dark ages, bubbling with stoat meat and old turnips)? Most importantly, is it strictly to be placed in the starter-option/lunch-food Venn diagram, or does it have a place at the breakfast table? I ask because Soup and Salad have built one of those A-board street signs, to tell me about their breakfast menu, and I don’t want to think about breakfast falling into the ‘salad’ category.

I have been here before and I think their soups are insanely, cacklingly good – so I enter. The branding implies a world that is trying to dye itself green, but can’t afford enough dye. The A-board is failing: I am the only customer. In a stainless steel pot, framed by the lunch-soups, is the breakfast. But is it soup? Well yes – it’s porridge, soup of the morning. Organic, milky oats form a base (£1.50 - £2.50) and there are optional toppings like sultanas, golden syrup and strawberry jam (10p each). I get one with banana and a helping of brown sugar that is so generous it is bordering on psychotic. The result is hot, gooey and morally hearty. The onset of proper winter has been beating at my hands with a thin, serrated stick all week and this is a rousing defence. Soup and salad, I saloup you.

Euphorium Bakery, Islington

Euphorium Bakery
202 Upper St
Islington
N1 1RQ (Map)
020 7704 6905
www.euphoriumbakery.com

by Henrietta Crumpet

Darling, I will never forget that day, that breakfast. The smell of musk in your hair, so sensuous, so… manly. I wore deep red lipstick. You recalled your days as a gigolo in Paris.

I had a strawberry tart. Staring deep into your eyes I bit into the fruit. I got custard on my nose and you licked it off. How playful. How delicious. The strawberries were sweet and fresh, the pastry crumbled and melted in my mouth, the custard danced past my sumptuous lips. It was all a bit much for you was it not, my darling? When I partook of a second pastry (an exquisite pain raisin), and peeled off the layers, dipping them into my coffee and sucking the ends, you started to tremble and had to content yourself with an egg mayonnaise sandwich on thick brown bread.

It would have been an eggy, creamy delight, I think, if there had been any filling to delight in. But alas, a mere smear across the bread, a hint of a yolk and a whiff of white was all that was present. We wept. I craved a sympathetic glance from the staff. They were oblivious to our pain and announced that "that was how they made their sandwiches". How they let themselves down. How they let us down. The pastries so perfect. The sandwiches so disappointing. My fan dropped to the floor, you rose from your chair, nearly careering into one of the many mothers with babies as you hastened to exit.

"Pierre!" I shouted, "Don’t leave me! I will make you an egg sandwich wearing nothing but a silk negligee whilst I recite passages from Voltaire!"

But you were gone. My mascara ran down my cheeks. And all I had left was cake.

Special Dispatch: Darts Farm, Topsham, Exeter

Darts Farm
Topsham
Exeter
EX3 0QH
01392 878200
www.dartsfarm.co.uk

by Armand Croissant

I have over-indulged on port. Somehow, I do not know, I have ended up, driven in a battered Mercedes, in a curious place. I cannot remember how we got here. I am suspicious. There is no noise, apart from a gentle hum of conversation. I look around.

What brave new world is this? What sweet airs, what delights? I am Caliban – and also Miranda – bewitched by teetering piles of produce so fresh and clean it seems as if, Eden-like, it sprang from the ground without anything so vulgar as labour coming into the equation; and what is this? A café! But there is something wrong – nobody is jostling, or swearing; the waiters have their faces contorted into what I believe is called a ‘smile’. Our food arrives not, as is customary, twenty-seven minutes after we have sat down, but, even though the place is crammed, within three or four. O miraculous salmon, sliced pink and new, mating eternally with the creamy, succulent egg! O substantial toast, crackling nicely between my teeth, grainy and buttered! O sausage-sliced-in-half-lengthways, nestling between two snow-white slices of bread! O elegant teapot, oh abundant water, oh, oh, oh (as Molly Bloom would have it). Is this the future? What is going on? Am I dreaming? Have I been transported into outer space?

I ask a grizzled local. Thiz bain’t ‘eaven, he says. It be Devon.

Le Pain Quotidien, St Pancras International

Le Pain Quotidien
Unit 4
St Pancras International
Somerstown
NW1 2QP (Map)
020 7486 6154
www.lepainquotidien.com

by Rhys Chris Peese

The hyperbole, bombast and flummery generated by the rerouting of Eurostar trains to St. Pancras might lead one to suspect that something interesting is going on there. Relax. It’s not. The main difference is that it’s now blighted with a surfeit of franchised retail outlets. Our continental cousins will now be welcomed to the UK with… some shops. And a big statue.

The only breakfast choice at present is Le Pain Quotidien, a Belgian chain priding itself on artisanal bread and communal tables. What they have reckoned without, however, is a tendency for those communal tables to unite the British into micro-communities of wry, near-affectionate xenophobia. “You’d have thought they’d do a full English,” muttered one malcontent as he surveyed the bread and pastry-heavy menu. Others were keen to concur, identifying the serving of boiled eggs with bread, rather than toast soldiers, as symptomatic of a creeping European malaise. Hackles were raised further by the lack of English breakfast tea, and the irritating fact that the ‘pot’ of coffee was identical in volume to the bowl from which it was intended to be drunk. And when the old dear next to me sent her tepid porridge back three times to be heated properly, saying, “Porridge should be hot! Or is it the French way?” our table was ready to brick up the Channel Tunnel altogether.

Still, we enjoyed our warm Belgian waffles and granola parfaits. The former was succulent, crumbly and not too sweet; the latter, a spectacular sundae, was replete with melon, blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, cashew nuts, pumpkin seeds, mint leaves and yoghurt. But the question remains: why provide a continental breakfast for passengers a couple of hours away from being able to get an authentic one abroad, and why welcome visitors to the UK with the cuisine that they’ve just travelled to escape from?

Special Dispatch: Sylvia's, New York

Sylvia’s
328 Lenox Avenue
New York, NY  10027
USA
(+1) (212) 996-0660
www.sylviassoulfood.com

by Megan Bacon

“Ladies and gentleman!” yells a waiter at the front of a steadily forming queue. “Prepare yourselves for the best breakfast of your lives!”

To be quite honest, I’m not really hungry. In fact, I’ve already had breakfast today, having woken up unreasonably early to fulfil my duties as a tourist. But for Sylvia’s, I’ll make an exception. Every Sunday, Sylvia Woods' 45-year-old Harlem establishment serves up a soul food ’n’ gospel breakfast to a mixture of New Yorkers, out-of-towners and foreign tourists.

I go for the full monty: fried chicken, scrambled eggs and grits – the latter which, like so much else in New York, I’ve only ever seen in the movies. Turns out, they’re damn fine – like a salty, buttery porridge. The chicken is a no-holds-barred full-fat delight, with gently crisped and seasoned skin, and the scrambled eggs are just right. A dab of Sylvia’s hot sauce and I’m ready to go – my non-hunger is immediately forgotten.

We move on to the dessert menu. (Dessert for breakfast! I truly have died and gone to heaven). Now this is where Sylvia’s really excels itself. The world famous Red Velvet cake is exactly as it sounds: a sandwich of bright red cake and velvety icing, while the banana pudding is nothing less than an orgasm on a plate. We finish off with bloody marys.

Did I mention that people are singing gospel songs throughout all of this? Well, they are – while shouting out where each table of diners is from (“Sweden’s in the house, y’all!”). Sylvia herself joins them for a boogie. But is this the best breakfast of my entire life? Well, the service is impeccable and friendly. The food is delicious, hangover-curing, filling and fattening. And by the time we leave, the whole restaurant has erupted into a party. If there’s a better breakfast on earth, I’d like to hear of it.

Scandinavian Kitchen, Fitzrovia

Scandinavian Kitchen
61 Great Titchfield Street
Fitzrovia
W1W 7PP
www.scandikitchen.co.uk

by Hashley Brown

Having dropped Mrs Brown off for her early morning flight to Norway, what better way, I thought, to commune with her pending Nordic isolation than to consume a hearty Scandinavian Breakfast. What a treat then to find my idle daydreams made real in the aptly titled Scandinavian Kitchen nestling in the faux-village that is Fitzrovia. It’s a veritable Scandi wet-dream. Imagine all those cheeky Danish bacon adverts of your childhood rolled up with a healthy dose of Marimekko prints and some Arne Jacobsen furniture. Oh, and Roxette. “Speak up” the sign says, “we’re hard of herring.”

Reminiscent of all the lovely cafés I’ve ever visited in Copenhagen and Stockholm, Scandinavian Kitchen feels like a genuine slice of Scandi pie in the middle of town, and the breakfast platter they served up matched those Swedish farmhouse breakfasts I long for when the full English grease gets a bit much. Some smoked ham, a bit of pate, a soft boiled egg, some pickled herrings, that cheese with the holes in, some cheese without, as well as fresh breads of various hues, all topped off with lots of black coffee, made an uncharacteristically early morning seem peculiarly palatable. Add to this the cheery demeanour of the proprietor and the newspaper proffered when I sat down, and I almost considered emigrating.

Happily I rolled out the door feeling pleasantly full with the reassuring impression that Scandinavians the world over are jolly, herring munching, skinny-dipping types, and knowing I’ll be going back for more.

In the words of Roxette. “Loving is the ocean, Kissing is the wet sand, She's got the look.”

Exactly…

Dalston Lane Cafe, Hackney

***PLEASE NOTE THE MANAGEMENT OF DALSTON LANE CAFE HAS NOW CHANGED - BELOW REVIEW FOR ARCHIVE/ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY***

Dalston Lane Cafe
170c Dalston Lane
Hackney
E8 1NG
020 7254 4704

by Gracie Spoon

If breakfast leaves the frying pan at 12.30pm and travels in a straight line for 8 minutes at the speed of very very hungry, what does x equal and why?

Some simple maths:

Chosen from a straightforward menu, 2 veggie breakfasts at £4.25. Speedy with hunger, it takes a relentless 8 minutes to dispose of them. 1 minute 30 seconds for the egg, lightly fried and still juicily ripe at its yolk. 45 seconds each for a couple of veggie sausages, swollen on tasty protein-texture. 30 seconds for a tomato the size of a fist. And for the mushrooms – not too much slip, not too much salt - a lingeringly loyal minute. 30 seconds spent pointing out a toast shortage; only a minute to create another drain on supply. A final 60 seconds is spent targeting a medium-sized reservoir of beans.

Light breezes over 12 café-ers murmuring at Sunday volume, behind them 3 silent staff wash up with Sisiphyan resolve. But here, an uncharitable question mark tightens around this otherwise satisfying breakfast… Those silent staff… what - really what - could they have been washing? Let me explain. Preceding those happy 8 minutes of fevered breakfast-eating, 40 minutes of not breakfast-eating had been brewing discontent. Forty minutes may not be unreasonable for many other pursuits, but for a simple breakfast from a capsule menu, 40 minutes is time gone elastic. This empty-bellied purgatory made us mean in spirit and in observation. Only 4 out of 12 people ate at one time – individuals would be served, would eat, would pay and would leave. And still not-breakfast-eating time would pass. It doesn’t compute. By my calculations, the mind-bending equation of

breakfasts
divided by staff
minus time spent washing up

can only work if

x = 4 plates in the entire café.

Cowshed Clarendon Cross, Holland Park

Cowshed Clarendon Cross
119 Portland Road
Holland Park
W11 4LN
020 7078 1944
www.cowshedclarendoncross.com

by Alotta Waffle

I haven’t ever tried sinking into a bath of melted chocolate after a long, back-breakingly hard day in the office but I imagine that it’s rather like walking over the threshold of Cowshed: soothing, delicious and such a relief.

Half kitsch kitchen, half spa, food is prepared for ladies who breakfast as they wait to have their mani/pedi in one of the giant treatment thrones and watch Sex and the City on mini televisions.

Hiding a hangover beneath my maxi sunglasses last Sunday, I scuttled in and took my place at the communal table between other single gals and pairs of Notting Hill yummy mummies in cashmere sweaters. Two mugs of detoxing green tea later and I felt well enough to turn my attention from the Sunday Times Style to the menu.

Limp, soggy or meagre cereals are a particular bugbear of mine at the best of times and are certainly no antidote to a stomach swirling with one too many passion fruit martinis. Thankfully, the mountain of toasted granola with pumpkin seeds, hazelnuts, Greek yogurt, honey and banana soon had me so buzzing with antioxidants that I was able to move onto one of their freshly-baked, iced vanilla cupcakes.

Leaving the yummies around me to exclaim over the scrambled eggs on sourdough toast (“low GI, darling”) or homemade strawberry jam (“well it is Sunday”) I returned to the realities of the outside world restored to full health.

Cowshed is posh(ish) heaven for girly meet-ups or a blissful breakfast by yourself. The usual clientele may have bulging (Mulberry) wallets, but at £5 a head for breakfast, even those on a tighter budget can have their cake, eat it and get their nails done.

06 St Chad's Place, King's Cross

06 St Chad’s Place
6 St Chad's Place
King’s Cross
WC1X 9HH
020 7278 3355
www.6stchadsplace.com

by Blake Pudding

“Do you do breakfast?”
“We don’t do a fried breakfast.”
“Could we see the menu?”
“No, we don’t do a menu.”
“What do you have for breakfast?”
“We have scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, bacon.”
“Super, I’ll have scrambled eggs and bacon on toast.”
“You have to make the toast yourself.”

Now I know this dialogue sounds relatively innocuous but words on the page do not convey the implications behind the waitress’s replies.

She put the emphasis on fried as if there was something morally wrong about an English breakfast. It reminded me of the disapproval aroused when I mentioned that I didn’t recycle. Her tone when announcing that there wasn’t a menu suggested that there was something hierarchical about menus. Don’t you oppress me with your patriarchal lists and colonial meals! So a lot of politics in the customer service and no, before you write in, this wasn’t in my imagination. John O’ Connell noticed it too and he is the world’s nicest most non-abrasive person and he has just been on an 'establishing best practice in multi-platform publishing' course organised by Time Out. Enough politics- what was the food like?

My bacon was obviously a quality rasher once but tasted like it had been gently boiled in burnt fat. The scrambled eggs were nicely cooked but also watery, probably a sign of the mixture sitting around too long. My toast was excellent though I did cook it myself. John had a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel which he was delighted with. He particularly liked the amount of rocket used. “Too much rocket can be pubic,” he muttered mysteriously. He added that he would definitely go back, and so would I as long as the serving staff dropped the Edward Said and learnt to serve and the cooks learnt to cook.

Café RED, Kentish Town

*****THIS CAFE HAS CLOSED*****

Café RED
298 Kentish Town Road
Kentish Town
NW5 2TG
020 7482 7300

by Poppy Tartt

Jordan picked the restaurant. He said the name held a special significance for him. That was before we knew about the acronym. RED actually stands for ‘Really Excellent Dining’. I don’t think Jordan knows much about Really Excellent Dining. All I’ve ever seen him eat was a little piece of ham.

Jordan Catalano sailed to me on a dreamboat from a psychic fantasia. I’ve been in love with him since I was fourteen. So here he is, defying the real, even the fact that his body belongs to a vegan film star who wears eyeliner. He’s so beautiful I could yelp. Thank you, world, for cracking my dream and bringing me this quivering yolk of a man!

He’s unable to read the menu of course, so I order him a Red breakfast. It seems almost wrong to eat. I’m having Eggs Benedict – though I’m not sure there’s a place for eggs in the psychic fantasia. It’s hard to feel dreamy when there are eggs around. I don’t know if I want to see Jordan Catalano eat blood pudding.

We are served by a jovial spiller. The breakfast is good enough to eat. Only the eggs are perfect though, pert whites holding trembling yellows like breath in a cheek. They are ruined by the vinegary hollandaise, a graze on my tongue, which recalls to me fantasy’s unhappy aftertaste. As we leave, Jordan breaks into song. “I was going nowhere, going nowhere fast, drowning in my memories, living in the past. Everything looked black until I found her – she’s all I need, that’s what I said. Oh oh oh – I call her RED. She’s my shelter from the storm, she’s a place to rest my head; late at night she keeps me safe and warm. I call her RED.” In truth, reality eats dreams.

Gastro, Clapham

Gastro
67 Venn Street
Clapham
SW4 0BD
020 7627 0222

by Rhys Chris Peese

There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing something done perfectly, and Gastro does two things perfectly. The first is scrambled eggs. I don’t much like scrambled eggs, but I was wholly won over by the rich buttery flavour and succulent texture. The second is being French. They couldn’t be much more French if they tried. Indeed, the very lack of effort elevates them to further levels of Gallicism. Boy, are they French. Really, really French.

The nicotine-brown bar is replete with mismatched furniture, battered tin adverts for Ricard and posters detailing the seafood of Brittany. But there’s no smack of ‘theme’ here: the bowls of darkly-roasted coffee confirm that this is the real deal. £4.50 gets you a Gastro Special: thick-cut streaky bacon, a small but delicious Toulouse sausage, undercooked tomato, a heap of rather bland mushrooms, and those flawless eggs.

After that, the pain au chocolat was a disappointment: not terrible, but hardly memorable. Having not breakfasted at Gastro in about ten years, the one thing I remembered, and was looking forward to most, was the chocolat chaud bol. Alas, another disappointment; chocolat froid bol. Froid et mélangé insuffisamment. Bof!

Entertainment at the big communal table was provided by the witless, strident public school banter of the students we shared it with. At one point they even compared provision for History of Art courses at Edinburgh, Bristol, York and Durham. But that’s the price you pay for eating in Clapham.

Service is friendly, if insouciant. You expect every request to be met with a ‘peut-être’ rather than a ‘oui’, and indeed the bread we were offered to accompany our breakfasts never appeared: not so much pain-perdu as pain-oublié. Have I mentioned that they really are very, very French?

Orient EspressO, Borough

Orient EspressO
59-61 Borough High Street
Borough
SE1 1NE
0207 7407 6266

by Bree Oche

Borough on a drizzly Sunday is a depressing place. The Saturday hustle of the market a lingering memory, the streets are sparsely scattered with lost tourists and harried-looking locals. It was with great disappointment that I registered the Sunday closure of Harpers, a friendly-looking Italian spoon whose neon “Full English £3.70” had been whetting my appetite for some time. A slightly soggy hangover scrum ensued, the result being a table for two in the colourful and slightly manic Orient EspressO.

The café exuded the potent whiff of a youth hostel or college canteen, the tables covered with a montage of tourist mockery and popular culture icons, plastered down with sticky backed plastic. Despite there being no Full English, a dose of Eggs Benedict clocked in at a mere £3.50, whilst the friendly atmosphere and brightly lettered blackboards lent the room and feeling of heartfelt sincerity. A quarter of an hour after ordering, our coffees finally appeared on the distant horizon of the service counter, the sole waitress / barista / chef coping remarkably well under the obvious duress of staff shortages. Despite her best efforts however, the quality of the food was another matter.

What I was presented with was the kind of meal one would expect to stumble across in a McDonalds, should they ever decide to create ‘Eggs McBenedict’ - two rubbery poached eggs perched lopsidedly on a fold of cold ham on a semi-toasted English muffin, drowning in a sea of yellow, packet-mixed Hollandaise sauce. Oh, with a side of toast and blackcurrant jam, on the same plate, also sat in the Hollandaise. Fittingly, there was also a shortage of actual cutlery in the building, so I had to make do with the dreaded plastic variety.

Five minutes and one broken fork later, I physically could not bring myself to continue eating. The mere memory of the slimy, solid eggs and the puckered skin of the sauce turns my stomach even now. Indeed, as a way of comparison, I even began to believe that the combination of jam and Hollandaise was actually pretty good. Enough said.

Special Dispatch: Starbucks, Beijing Capital International Airport, China

Starbucks
Terminal 2
Beijing Capital International Airport
China

by Des Ayuno

It takes a lot for me to set foot in a Starbucks – especially when delicacies like tea eggs, mustard pickles, red-bean buns and tooth-erodingly sweet soya gruel appear in even the humblest local breakfasts. But the only other option airside offered clingfilm-wrapped, condensation-sodden plates of noodles microwaved-while-u-wait. (Though I often enjoy mysterious street-market snacks that my nice, middle-class translator is convinced will leave me vomiting for days, mushy noodles were a bridge too far.) I queued up for a steaming mug of rapacious global capitalism behind a regrettably overweight pair of ladies from the American northeast. One interrogated a waitress about the availability of the kind of novelty coffees the ordering of which is a pretty good gauge of slappability. “Frappucino? Caramel macchiato? Chai tea laa-taay?” she repeated, ever louder and slower, as the waitress’ look of polite confusion settled into rictus.

My macchiato, though it had enough milk to send any red-blooded Italian apoplectic, was of the reliable, border-defying standard that is the whole point of places like Starbucks: it tasted exactly as it would in London, or Lithuania. In a nation that credits tea with the ability to cure everything from insomnia to cancer, it was an achievement. Avoiding “ethnic” versions of standard baked goods, I went for a carrot muffin, which came in an impressive-looking clamshell-style moulded-plastic carton I spent ten minutes trying to open, and then cut my finger on. It was still stale. It cost as much as ten breakfasts from the canteen of the print factory I’d come to visit, or three hours’ wages for the people who work there, or an amount some Londoners wouldn’t stoop to pick up in the street. That it didn’t leave me vomiting for days is the most that can be said for it.

Flâneur, Clerkenwell

***FLANEUR HAS NOW CLOSED (BUT THE REVIEW IS STILL ENTERTAINING)***

Flâneur
41 Farringdon Road
Clerkenwell
EC1M 3JB
020 7404 4422
www.flaneur.com

by Phil English

Before I move on to describing a truly marvellous breakfast, I would like to address you on the unholy trinity of syphillis, buggery and condoms. As an amateur observer of socio-linguistic developments, as well as a professional breakfaster, I am interested in the way we attribute certain activities and objects to other nations. Thus, when they were engaged in squalidly trying to knock each other's heads off in the sixteenth century, the French took to referring to the pox as "Le mal italien" and the Italians said rightbackatcha, bringers of the "French disease". Similarly, the French accuse my countryfolk of "le vice anglais" and we counter that another postal strike would be welcome if you were expecting a letter from a Frenchman.

Which brings me to the subject of French toast. Presumably this is an Americanism. In England we call it eggy bread. Which is accurate and uninspired, but not offensive. Perhaps this xeno-specific appelation is a homage to pain-perdu, but I think that it's probably more along the lines of the dubious monikers above. As in, "Hey Hank, check out this toast; it's all eggy and shit. Those French dudes, man. They suck!" In these times of renaming the potato chip for reasons of geo-political outrage, I shall henceforth be terming the dish Freedom Toast. Vive La France.

I and my colleague Padraig Oates, who for the record did not order an Irish coffee, had an absolutely sumptuous breakfast at Flaneur. Oddly, though, for an overtly Gallic joint, they refer to the above dish by its American name. Still, it came rich and crispy with delicious smoked bacon and maple syrup. Mr Oates had neutral, United Nations, toast with bacon and scrambled eggs. Plus freshly squeezed orange juice, a nice pot of tea and a cup of good coffee, all for a very reasonable sum, which currently escapes me. But, where were you guys? There was no-one there. This place is serving breakfast and it's doing it now. Go.

Kings Café, Finchley

Kings Café
8 Hendon Lane
Finchley
N3 1TR
020 8346 1778

by Nelson Griddle

Up in the supremely Jewish neighbourhood of Finchley, a plateful of bacon, black pudding and other porky delights might seem an odd way to start the day. Sometimes, though, a cream cheese bagel just won’t cut it, and it was in this spirit that I went to check out the traif at Kings Café one foggy October morning.

First impressions heralded the classic greasy spoon experience. There was a chilled display cabinet full of Coke cans, a fruit machine, an England flag and proudly framed basic food hygiene certificates. Yet after a quick perusal of the big yellow menu over the counter, I began to wonder whether the staff (a team of efficient young Turkish men in yellow pique polo shirts) had really got to grips with the basics of our National Breakfast. Take Set Breakfast No 1, for example, which turns out to be liver, bubble, onions, mushrooms and beans. Set Breakfast No 3, even more alarmingly, is bubble, onions, tomato, mushrooms and – wait for it – spaghetti.

Such outlandishness was enough to prompt me off-menu, plumping for the high-protein option of egg, bacon, sausage and black pudding, plus toast and tea. I settled back, read a left-behind copy of yesterday’s Sun, and waited for the food to arrive.

When it came, my doubts were dispelled. Presentation rarely counts for terribly much in the world of the English Breakfast, but this ample portion, nestling there on a white oval plate had an undeniable visual impact. OK, it’s not nouvelle cuisine, but add a zig-zag of brown sauce and to my eye, this breakfast could have been a hot contender for food-as-art.

The meal scored high taste-wise, too. The egg was beautifully cooked, the bacon gratifyingly crisp, and although the black pudding was a trifle dry, as black pudding often tends to be, I was won over. And with no regrets about skipping the spaghetti.

Café Fleur, Wandsworth

Café Fleur
198 St. Ann's Hill
Wandsworth
SW18 2RT
020 8874 6897

by Blake Pudding

Delightfully common, I murmured to myself with an unbecoming leer as I clocked the waitresses.

Emily and James had told us to meet them at Café Fleur. You would not know that this is its name as it just says café café café café café around the top of the caff. It was a boiling hot day (how incongruous those words seem now) and I was dressed in a look best described as 80’s gay chic- white linen trousers rolled up to show off my shapely calves, stripy vest, panama hat. Alice was wearing a dress which emphasised her cleavage. We had had about 2 hours sleep.

The café seemed to have been staffed by roguishly pretty urchins straight out of those ASBO scum girl nightmare articles that crop up in the papers now and again. They were dressed in leisure wear, hair pulled tightly back, hoop earrings, incredibly pale skin and gappy teeth. They were of course utterly charming. The caff has been done up to make it look a bit “latte” but the girls gave away its proletarian origins. Happily it did a good honest working class breakfast. Frightening sausages obviously but you will have learnt by now to avoid such things. I went for the egg, bacon, bubble, tomato, black pudding, strong tea and toast. All were unpretentiously delicious.

To finish the fortification process we strolled over to the Alma for some Young’s Special though a little sleep would have been the healthier option.

Café Crescent, Camden Town

Café Crescent
40 Camden High St
Camden Town
NW1
020 7839 2823

by Nelson Griddle

****CAFÉ CRESCENT HAS NOW CLOSED. IT HAS BEEN REPLACED BY CAFÉ GRILL****

Café Crescent is a mixed bag. Its yellow-painted walls announce as much with their odd jumble of theatrical posters: Dirty Dancing shares space with The Cherry Orchard and Tony Hadley in Chicago jostles with Hamlet.

The theatricality continues with the sweetly-spoken, Beatnik-themed waitress. Meanwhile, swooning classical music plays from a tape recorder, and we chomp away to the theme from The Onedin Line. Such sweeping lyricism does little to cheer my fellow punters, though, as they stare over their mugs of tea, ruminating bleakly on the iniquities of the smoking ban and the trials of life in general. The tea here is hot and strong and made in a proper steel pot

For solid sustenance, I opt for egg, bacon, sausage, fried bread, mushrooms and grilled tomatoes. They say that frying an egg is the ultimate test of a chef and on that basis the man who wields the Crescent’s spatula is a genius of the first rank. The white of my egg is beautifully firm and the yolk a perfect orb of creamy liquid which glugs satisfyingly out onto the fried bread. The bacon, too, is done to the turn, and the sausage and mushrooms both put in a performance on the right side of acceptable.

All this good work is undone, however, by the presence of tinned tomatoes. I might as well confess now to LRB readers that I cannot stand tinned tomatoes. Fresh tomatoes, I love. Grilled tomatoes, I dote on. But tinned tomatoes have, from earliest childhood, turned my stomach. There’s something unnatural – almost Lovecraftian – about these sludgy things, in their primordial confusion of solid and liquid, with a taste so weirdly overpowering as to kill any other flavour stone dead. Ordering grilled tomatoes and being given the tinned variety is like…well, a bit like wanting to see The Cherry Orchard and ending up with Tony Hadley.

Café Crescent, take note. Ah well, at least the tea’s alright.

Dem Cafe Bar, Stoke Newington

Dem Cafe Bar
18 Stoke Newington High St
Stoke Newington
N16 7PL
020 7254 6364

by Duke Eggington

You know what it’s like when you arrive in a small town early in the morning half asleep at the wheel. Your eyes are stinging and your stomach feels like an acid pit. Such is the mood as I wander into DEM on a Saturday morning.

After a cup of the finest Illy coffee for me, and a juice with a pink straw to match my baby’s dress for her, I order a DEM veggie breakfast – an English-Kurdish fusion. Predictably the hash brown and veggie sausage are nothing to sing and dance about, and the grilled halloumi and chilli olives aren’t to everyone’s taste - but there’s something appealing about a good dose of salt first thing in the morning. The inclusion of cold salad items like cucumber and tomato could also have some folk heading straight back out the door, but removal of surface skin in both cases kept us happy.

The baked beans on toast for my baby is nothing special, but when you’re feeding a two-year-old it’s best to keep things simple. The bread is a mixed experience: while of the authentic Turkish variety, it is also somewhere between bread and toast, neither nice and soft or entirely crispy.

In fact, the best thing about the breakfast has to be the waitress - a Middle Eastern beauty who either of us would gladly taken home, either for her generous smiles, or her free-flowing lollipops. By the time we leave we are both sewn up, but not stitched up. If we’d turned the corner onto Stoke Newington Church Street we would have had similar food at roughly double the price.

I urge you to check Dem out.

The Zetter, Clerkenwell

The Zetter
St John's Square
86-88 Clerkenwell Rd
Clerkenwell
EC1M 5RJ
020 7324 4444
www.thezetter.com

by Malcolm Eggs

A flight to Madrid, sixty-five fish fingers, a "Garden Dreamscape beading kit", 100ml of Panacur 10% (For Dogs), a full English breakfast at The Zetter. All these things cost £16.99. I'm no regular patron of lists such as this: it's all too easy to find oneself impaled on the horns of dilemmas such as 'dinner vs more wine'. Just spend as required and let Future Malcolm work it out - that's the key. But as Orva Easy and I emerged from The Zetter, a boutique hotel in the historic backlands of Clerkenwell, I found myself imagining a million different Malcolms - this one with his shampoo and pen knife, that one with his square foot of office space - and I had this horrible suspicion that nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine of them received better value for money than the one trying to get to the point in this review.

I knew it would be disappointing before the waitress even reached us - the light was good, I'll give them that - and the closer the ghoulish rashers that crowned the heap loomed, the worse my morning became. Cooked on one side only, they were rarer than a man campaigning to Save the Diplodocus. My first instinct was to dash for the solace of the poached egg, but its undercooked core of translucent goo would give me days of nasty flashbacks. The toast was cut from an excellent loaf but would buttering it have been impossible? Nondescript mushroom and tomato and a likeable (if dense) sausage could only try vainly to balance the books, because a breakfast this expensive should be a wonderful memory, not - at best - a boring anecdote.

Flame Cafe Bistro, Highbury

Flame Cafe Bistro
246 St Paul's Rd
Highbury
N1 2LJ
020 7354 1546

by Poppy Tartt

Several fasts were broken this morning. Petersen and Peterson and I, together again after months held apart by the Atlantic Ocean and the weight of our incompatible life choices, fell on each other like old friends reunited. (Which we were). We had expected Henry Pottinger, but he cried off, pleading a cookery course. A lucky escape for him, if you know how he feels about beans. No one, not even H. P., needs to spend Tuesday morning on their knees.

Flame is dark and hot and empty, like an unpopular brothel. (Though Peterson, still resisting the rebranding of the English summer, thought it chilly). We ordered tea. It was just the weak side of too strong, and the teabag was not in evidence. Thank god! The tea was good. Then the beans came. Petersen and Peterson (full English meaty and veggy, respectively) were strong. “It’s just like a caff breakfast!” Petersen said cheerfully. Brave in the face of mushrooms so wizened and oily they might have spent a lifetime tanning on the tackier beaches of southern Spain, she parted her pre-formed egg to show me the dusty yolk within. Peterson’s scrambled eggs had not been burnt and she was, as usual, disappointed. My ‘Flame Medi’ – garlic sausage, egg, halloumi, tomatoes and cucumber atop several slices of toast – was merciful, if not in any sense biblical.

Still, thank god I was saved from the monstrous beanslick polluting the plates of Petersen and Peterson. Thank god for halloumi! For halloumi I would kneel on a Tuesday. Yes, I thank Halloumi that where breakfasts are unpredictable three things at least are unchanging: the love between Petersen and Peterson and I; my fascination with their spectacular breasts; and Halloumi, mother of all cheeses – mother, perhaps, of us all.

Special Dispatch: Coast Cafe, Newquay

Coast Cafe
54 Fore Street
Newquay
Cornwall
TR7 1LW
01637 854 976

by Al Penn

The sport of surfing thrums with an undertone of sublime mystery. Its ideal participant is a winsome, yet monosyllabic loner; blonde of hair and blue of eye, he stares into the middle distance, head cocked attentively, all senses alert to the possibility of a killer wave. This quest for perfection is among the loftiest of all endeavours. It's a straightforward metaphor for more transparently spiritual pursuits. To ride the perfect wave is achieve Nirvana, or to enter Heaven. It is a death in the midst of life.

Pro surfers don't concern themselves with any of that, of course, or at least very few of them do. Like all successful sportsmen they're interested in ranking points, sponsorship deals and the acquisition of trophies rather than enlightenment. To further these worldly ends the very best that either hemisphere can offer are gathered at Fistral Beach, here in Newquay, for the Rip Curl Boardmasters Festival of Surf.

We park the car on a gravelly clifftop and head down towards the beach. We're hungry. The sea air and unwonted exercise will do that to you. And you'll go to bed early and wake up late and blame your aches and pains on the unfamiliar mattress rather than the sudden employment of ageing, forgotten muscles.

Coast is a small place. The décor is determinedly mid-Atlantic, as much Nantucket as Newquay; it's run and staffed by a co-operative of handsome, unhurried women who have a similarly washed-out yet comfy look about them. A baby is passed around amongst them as they take and prepare our order. It's almost like a parlour game for the Cornish genteel. So Coast is no greasy spoon. Oddly, there's no real odour of food in the place. The calm-eyed ladies seem to magic the fare up without getting their hands dirty. My wife challenges them with bacon and tomatoes. I plump for a discreet ham and cheese toastie.

The act of cooking snack food may lack the metaphysical resonance of surfing, but it too is all about maintaining equilibrium. And my hasty breakfast proves to be nicely balanced. The coffee is excellent, strong enough, and not too bitter. My toasted sandwich is perfect, crisp but not burnt, the cheese is fully molten yet net neither greasy nor inedibly hot. As a special, unexpected treat I get to finish my daughter's ice cream (she's an eccentric eater). Breakfast for two-and-a-half comes to exactly a tenner. “Neat,” I think.

On the beach, minutes later, and on flat water, Brazilian maestro Pedro Henrique surfs a miraculous 9.70 straight at us, finishing up no more than twenty yards away. It's the best ride of the week. “Also neat,” I say. The wife nods, staring calmly out to sea.

Franklins, East Dulwich

Franklins
157 Lordship Lane
East Dulwich
SE22
020 8299 9598
(Full breakfast menu served Saturdays only, from 10am - 4pm)

by Herby Banger and Tina Beans

Whispers in the shadows, rumours and seductive hearsay were all pointing to one thing. Franklins, the best restaurant in Dulwich, and some say South East London, also dabbled in cooking breakfasts. And what an experience it was meant to be: the teller told all with the sideways grin and twinkling eyes of someone who had struck breakfast gold.

So last Saturday we arrived at Franklins, took a seat in the beautifully light surroundings of their restaurant section, and ordered two Full English cooked breakfasts. We sat back to wait, already aware that this could be breakfast history in the making.

Our lattes arrived first, veritable goblets of fine hot coffee that soothed the soul, as we watched with pleasure the gentlemen chefs made visible by the open wall to the kitchen. Inside they busied themselves like ants; carefully constructing our food, each one knowing perfectly what was required of the other. No fuss, no speaking, just judgment, care and expertise.

We can say that with confidence now, because these Rembrandts of the breakfast world, these craftsmen, produced simply the best breakfast we have had since forever. It was if all other breakfasts had been merely in black and white; Franklins, however, have discovered colour. Everything was unspeakably tasty. The grilled tomato did that rare thing of shedding off any vegetable confusion and proved itself as a delicate fruit, fragrant and succulent and exploding in your mouth. The homemade black pudding was a delight. The sausage was strong, and dense, as was the bacon that tasted as if the pig had slept under a duvet upon a cloud. Then the eggs, oh the eggs. Golden, moist, soft scrambled eggs that put all other attempts to shame. We have never tasted eggs this wonderful. All this and a mushroom and some fine toast for £7.

We swoon for this breakfast.

The Caramel Room, Knightsbridge

The Caramel Room
The Berkeley Hotel
Wilton Place
Knightsbridge
SW1X
020 7235 6000
www.berkeleyhoteluk.co.uk

by Alotta Waffle

The Caramel Room sounds like a part of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory - down the corridor from Fudger's Library or alongside the Bubble Gum Bathroom perhaps. Actually, it's The Berkeley's breakfasting room and what it lacks in Oompa-Loompas, it makes up for in white-jacketed waiters whisking laden silver platters to tables of business types, American families and country aristocrats en route to Harrods.

Ever the fish out of water, I managed to bag a table last Saturday - stocking up on all the (proper) newspapers at the table beside the entrance. Whilst my companion selected a cholesterol-free egg white omelette with grilled vegetables from the a la carte menu, I walked around (and around... and around again) a buffet table that is surely every serious breakfaster's heaven. Bypassing the origami-like portions of smoked salmon (fishy breath before 11am is socially dubious), I began with delicately sliced papaya, perfectly proportioned pineapple and shot glasses full of plump-to-bursting blackberries. I rounded the corner and came across a contender for the best homemade muesli in town, (generous on the nuts without overdoing the raisins), then made the final turn towards the serried ranks of miniature pastries, tarts, croissants and doughnuts. It was Willy Wonka all over again.

Back at the table, the "firm but not rubbery" omelette was devoured as I made my way through a third giant pot of vanilla tea. We left after a further hour of paper reading, me light-headed from gallons of this tea that was so moreishly sweet I was powerless to resist, my companion light-walleted from the £70 bill. Breakfasters here will need to have a budget considerably bigger than their appetite. Or alternatively just a love of Roald Dahl.

Special Dispatch: Divalls, Brighton

Divalls
3 Terminus Road
Brighton BN1 3PD
01273 776 277

by Des Ayuno

****DIVALLS HAS NOW CLOSED****

Divalls, with the tattiest facade in Brighton and a wheels-akimbo wheelchair blocking the door, exuded the appeal of the depressingly familiar – like recognising faces in your local dole queue, or Kathy Burke in Nil by Mouth. The Scot, irritable and silent after an early morning rail replacement bus, on which Italian ladies in leopard-print Lycra screeched at each other over gangs of shrill 13-year-olds, snapped back to life, whispered “fantastic” and bounded inside.

Inside, every surface was covered in blistered veneer-effect laminate, except for the creepy flesh-coloured Formica tabletops. A toothless, aggressive OAP in a pinny took orders at the till, flanked by sepia photographs of an eye-rolling pug and a framed portrait of Arthur Lowe. The rest of the customers, mostly scraggly kids, drank tall glasses of milk and hid fags from the waitress, cos she knew their mums. Pale yellow, proudly non-free-range eggs and vinegary tinned mushrooms were more authentic set pieces than detractions from the star of the show – the bubble. It was churned out in an elaborate system that may yet entice Henry Ford to burst joyously out of his grave. Industrial quantities of mash and cabbage were packed into rows of giant Tupperware which shuffled slowly from kitchen-floor left to kitchen-floor right to griddle, where a giant cake of the stuff rested, the soft back edge replenished periodically from the tubs and, over the course of hours, nudged inexorably to the crispy front, there to be lopped off in six-inch squares and served. Even the Scot, not a bubble fan, was transfixed, as though regarding assembly-line production for the first time. I was entranced by its velvety soft, buttery centre and fine, crunchy surface. Truly, it is worth a trip to Brighton, life-shortening journey and all, for this delicacy alone.

Butler's Wharf Chop House, Bermondsey

Butler's Wharf Chop House
36e Shad Thames
Bermondsey
SE1
020 7403 3403
www.chophouse.co.uk

by H.P. Seuss

We grow weary of elaborate introductions about the "suffering pretentiousness of the author", or at least my nemesis Anonymous does. So these days we stick to the facts, and imagine our Web 2.0-empowered friend's approval at our precision with the truth - something he presumably finds and admires elsewhere in this blogosphere.

So, to the facts: Butler's Wharf Chop House is charmingly located in an attractive wharf next to Tower Bridge. Malcolm Eggs and I pootled along to sample the new breakfast menu and bask in the picture-postcard setting one sunny morning before we had given up on this summer as a damp squib.

Said menu is reassuringly English, with the modern adornments you would expect from an outpost of the Conran empire: kedgeree, benedict, outstanding fresh orange juice (bad fresh orange juice is one of the least documented of breakfast crimes, but like larceny, it can ruin your day). Prices are on the accessible side of expensive.

Malcolm Eggs and I, being creatures of habit, opted for two plates of full E. Here they are now: two ruddy sausages, rubbery bacon, poached eggs less amber than is my preference, charred mushrooms and aromatic tomatoes, all clamouring like shipwreck survivors on an oblong piece of toast. (I took this last quirk to be a nod back to our mediaeval culinary heritage, when bread served as plate). Quality, overall, is on the quotidian side of luxury.

But with the LRB's integgrity in mind, I must own up: this is the one and only time I or anyone else from the LRB has played the "influential blog" card and claimed the meal as complimentary. Before my Web 2.0-empowered friend cries foul, I must stress that the unnaturally attentive service and strange lack of satisfaction that comes from gaining for free what other must pay for not only gave me an insight into the mind of Victoria Beckham, but left me feeling a little awkward. I shall pay next time - and it will be pretty much worth it.

My Tea Shop, London Bridge

My Tea Shop
23 Duke Street Hill
London Bridge
SE1
020 7407 1110

by Muffin Gaye

I’ve always believed that honesty is a symptom of confidence, and everything about My Tea Shop screams out like Cherie Blair: “I’ve got nothing to hide!”. Anywhere that serves OJ (no ice) straight out of a Sainsbury’s container in front of you deserves respect for its blatant lack of pretence. Through the open counter you can see a kitchen that looks like the backroom of a car park ticket booth, replete with crude steel benchtops and even cruder white cutting boards and even cruderererer other stuff. The friendly staff do nothing to cover this up. It’s hard to be dissatisfied with imperfection when it’s friendly.

Likewise, their counter menu, printed straight off the Excel preview screen, was informative and easy on the eyes of someone conditioned to Microsoft Office. It’s almost as if they’ve tapped into that part of the human mind that’s evolved to feel comfortable with 2 columns written in Times New Roman. Sitting down, I look outside to see a range of hyperaesthetic advertisements pass by on buses and T-Shirts, and wonder where we all went wrong with all the fancy lines and colours and so forth. My Tea Shop is more than a restaurant. It’s a deprogramming environment.

Within 5 minutes of ordering, 2 plates of chips, tomato (4 halves!), bacon, and egg steam forth onto the table. The bacon is crisp, the egg not too runny and not too hard, the chips fluffy and the tomato bountiful. It’s a manifestation of the kind of simple fantasy that occupies the mind when one is fantasising about something that is actually possible. That this reality cost 8 pounds for 2 people makes the Playstation 3 seem even more overpriced.

You can realise your dreams at My Tea Shop, just not ones that involve spinach. But they’ve all been put there by celebrity chefs and doctors you don’t trust anyway.

The Grocery, Shoreditch

The Grocery
54-56 Kingsland Road
Shoreditch
E2
020 7729 6855
www.thegroceryshop.co.uk

by Des Ayuno

I wanted to hate the Grocery, an earnest supplier of organic puy lentils and 18 varieties of tofu metres from the edge of the UK’s poorest borough. But I knew I had to give its café a fair chance. The kitchen was set up by the magnificent Elaine, ex of Smallfish. Elaine once told me of a customer who complained that his breakfast was “dry” and demanded beans to remedy this problem. She frog-marched him out. Such conviction demands admiration.

M, J and I racked up late one Sunday and settled at beautiful, solid oak, country-kitchen tables. For at least half an hour we waited, without even tea to wet parched throats, though the surprise appearance of a bedraggled-looking Kevin Rowland cheered us no end. (He didn’t eat; just browsed the papers quietly.) By the time he ambled out, our food arrived. The lone waitress, already sitting down with her own lunch, handed over the brown sauce with a growl; the requested red never appeared.

As is the fashion these days, a tower of full-English ingredients was buttressed by toast and topped with a poached egg. With the exception of a very dry sausage (come on, Elaine!) all was juicily, flavourfully moreish – in fact, I nearly demanded more tomato than the miserly half offered. But it was the toast about which I still dream. Savoury sourdough, easily an inch thick, it was drenched in olive oil and transported us all to some sun-kissed Tuscan hillside. On a scale from “For god’s sake burn it down” to “I’m in heaven”, the toast trumped the dreadful service to secure the café a rating of “More please and thank you”. But when the waitress sprayed eco-disinfectant on the table, and my arm, the team that meets in the caffs headed home.

Special Dispatch: Kimchi, Seoul, Korea

Kimchi
Everywhere
Seoul
Korea

by Hashley Brown

The heart and soul of Korea lie in the perfect confluence of chilli, garlic and cabbage. The heart and soul of Korea then sits in a pot for yonks until it is the smelliest heart and soul you would ever have the fortune to wake up next to, even after a particularly unfortunate date. And this was how each of my days in my borrowed home of Seoul began - she wasn't pretty but by god did she taste good.

I talk not of my girlfriend, her sister or indeed her mother, with whom I had the pleasure of residing, but of kimchi. It stinks, it's hot, and it's delicious for breakfast.

The pedants amongst you dear readers, will no doubt inform me that actually this humble dish of fermented vegetables need not always use chilli nor even cabbage, indeed that the folk of Hamgyeongdo season theirs with fresh fish and oysters, and that to be frank I should probably get my self off to the Kimchi museum. But, throughout my short stay in Korea it was this fragrant, if potent combination of flavours that, like a good espresso kicked me roughly into each day.

The combinations were varied: kim-bap, a kind of kimchi based sushi roll; kimchi-chigae, a potent kimchi based soup; kimchi-jaen, yup, kimchi based pancakes, all featured. But for my money it was the simple start of a bowl of rice, some roasted seaweed and a plate of kimchi that relieved me of the night's stupor and threw down the gauntlet to any who dared come close to my new found kimchi-based aroma.

The best thing though, as potent as I now was, everyone else smelled bad too.

A link to the Kimchi Museum

Buy kimchi in London at:

Centre Point Food Store
20-21 St Giles High Street WC2

or

Hanna Supermarket
41 Store Street WC1E 7QF

or online at: www.skmart.co.uk

Purple, Streatham

Purple
The High Parade
Streatham High Road
Streatham
SW16
020 8677 2277

by Rhys Chris Peese

It may seem cavalier, on a website devoted to breakfasts, to reveal that I really don’t like eggs. Fried? No. Poached? Yuk. Boiled? Gah. In a bid to retain my reviewer’s credentials I’ll admit that scrambled can be palatable, especially with a bit of grated cheese and parsley. But that’s not good enough for Purple, tucked away on its sunless stretch of Streatham High Road. Instead, there’s a section on the menu entitled ‘Eggs Mania’, as if the liking of eggs were some kind of mental debility, available in varieties such as Benedict, or Florentine. However, they happily let me substitute peppers and asparagus from the vegetarian breakfast for the eggs on the full English, bringing joy to my heart, and less cholesterol to my arteries.

Mushrooms were the breakfast’s highlight; perfectly cooked with a rich flavour, and the sausage likewise. The grilled bacon was reasonable, although a second slice might have been nice, even for a £4.50 breakfast that included a small cup of thin coffee. The beans were hot, unlike the undercooked asparagus or the miserly quarter-tomato that had barely seen the grill.

My flatmate found herself at the sharp end of Purple’s frugality, though, when she ordered the Continental Breakfast. For £4.00 you get tea and fruit juice, but the accompanying croissant was small, burnt on the bottom, powdered mysteriously with icing sugar, ‘didn’t taste like a croissant’, and was served with margarine rather than butter: each of these an egregious offence to the French pastry.

Purple veers erratically between delightful success and awkward failure. It has aspirations beyond that of a greasy spoon, yet our wooden table was disconcertingly sticky. It has a friendly atmosphere, despite the jaunty, eponymous, colour scheme, punctuated with rubbish artworks. It’s this very inconsistency that keeps us going back, and half regretting it when we do.

Honest Food, Brixton

Honest Food
424 Coldharbour Lane
Brixton
SW9
0207 738 6161

by Eggmund Hillary

Perhaps it is a good sign that the blogs and online-user-review-pages for Honest Food are awash with strong differences of opinion. Or perhaps it’s just Brixton in general that sparks these debates. Is it part of the (often unwelcome) bourgeoisation / gentrification of the area or a welcome addition to the greasy spoons and sandwich shops of the area? Is it an over-priced, under-staffed veggie space that belongs in West London or a quiet little haven from the bustle of Coldharbour Lane?

After this morning’s hour long sitting, I would have to lump for the latter in both cases. OK, so the shelves are filled with delicacies that might not find much of a clientele in the area - pickled onion in thyme and pepper anyone? Or perhaps some organic Indian fish rub (blended in Yorkshire)? And the only newspaper being consumed was the Saturday Guardian. But all that aside, we at LRB are about the brekkie, so how was it?

Whilst the coffee certainly took longer to arrive than it should, I have to admit to not even noticing the delay. Something to do with the quiet, welcoming surroundings and the Kate Nash interview in the Guardian Guide. The breakfast followed soon after. It consisted of multi-seed toast (from a choice of four different kinds of bread) with melted butter, two fried eggs just the right side of runny, two large and tasty mushrooms, two crisp veggie sausages, fried tomatoes and a potato pancake. Quality ingredients all round, including coarse salt and black pepper, made this well worth the £5.95 price tag. With friendly service throughout and a healthily active community noticeboard for anyone looking for local yoga or pilates classes, Honest Food is a welcome addition to Brixton’s breakfast scene. You’ll just have to leave your Daily Telegraph at the door.

Whole Foods, Kensington

Whole Foods
The Barkers Building
63 - 97 Kensington High Street
Kensington
W8
0207 368 4500
www.wholefoodsmarket.com/UK/kensington/index.html

by H.P. Seuss

What the fuck is that SMELL?

Actually, smell doesn't capture it. It has the pervasiveness of a fug - but a fug is too low somehow, too damp. It has the dryness of an aroma - but then an aroma would imply that it's pleasant. It's not something you'd sniff for kicks.

Yeast is the predominant note, with sympathetic chords of wicker baskets, brioche and American things like popcorn and hire cars. There's a definite bouquet of straw, too; and with it the tang of manure and the surprisingly soft note of rotting flesh. The structure is redolent of emulsion paint. If it were a colour, it would be beige: the colour of Anya Hindmarsh's famous bags, of hemp rope for hanging, of barren earth, of David Cameron's soul.

It is the smell of Whole Foods, pumped through the basement food-hall, the ground floor "market" and the first floor "canteen", getting in your hair, your clothes, your credit card bills. It doesn't so much mask other smells as affix itself to them, flavouring them. It is the smell of our future as green consumers. And it's so revolting that the pornographic array of cheese, patisserie and pre-prepared salads for sale in Whole Foods will never be as appetising as they would be in any natural environment. It just doesn't feel organic in the way I understand it.

And frankly neither do any of the 26 varieties of killer tomatoes on sale, particularly the insipid orb that is part of my tepid, refectory-style "English Breakfast" on the first floor. The rest of this dry, fatty, Americanised assembly - grey-green scrambled eggs, semi-raw sausage, bacon jerky, white toast ("no brown available"! In the temple of choice!) - requires five separate squirts of ketchup to render it edible. It is pathetic.

In fact the whole enterprise - the insolently amiable staff, the idiotic queuing system, the instore art department you pass on the stairs - is so fake, cloying, hectoring and misguided, it makes your soul want to vomit. And I still can't get that fucking smell out of my nostrils.

Uplands Bar and Brasserie, East Dulwich

Uplands Bar and Brasserie
90 Crystal Palace Road
East Dulwich
SE22
020 8693 2662

by Herby Banger

This is a story of redemption; because today I have taken a risk, a gamble on a venue up until today banished and removed from the breakfasting dictionary of East Dulwich. It was at The Uplands Tavern that I witnessed our editor try and fail to eat what he still describes today as the worst breakfast he has ever had. This I might add was years ago now, well before the LRB, and in many respects this incident could be perceived by historians as one of the motivating factors behind the very inception of this project.

However, time is a great healer and in my case I was ready to give the place another chance. I’m glad I did, because I have just come back from one of the best breakfasts I’ve had in this area for a long time. East Dulwich is awash with greasy spoons, but since the Two Trees has shut there remain very few options for a finer cooked breakfast, with better ingredients, but we can etch The Uplands on to this list; well for now, anyway. Because this is the point: places change, chefs come and go, and people learn from their mistakes.

In 2007 you get a chunky plate of food for a reasonable £4.50, starring 2 thick and meaty quality sausages grilled delightfully. Two eggs accompany, well fried and (pls note editor!) cooked throughout. The bacon is well done, hot and snapping to attention. Grilled tomato, grilled mushroom, beans and a rack of toast make up the rest. Take into account a full selection of papers, airy light surroundings and the chance to order a pint if you choose, and I reckon you’ve found a good place to relax and enjoy breakfast at the weekend. As gambles go this one paid out.

Special Dispatch: The Antique Café, Chelsea, New York

The Antique Café
65 West 26th St
Chelsea
New York
+1 212-675-1663

by Cathy Latte

A free holiday with the Latte dynasty was always gonna be an interesting undertaking. All those idiosyncracies suddenly brought into sharp focus. Still, Central Park roams, bottles of rosé served up with the family stories you never knew existed, and the kind of silences you can only get away with when with those who you’ve known you all your life, made it all worthwhile. But I can’t lie; it was nice to get a day on my own.

It was a hot Saturday morning and I’d wandered out of the Chelsea flea market (Saturdays and Sundays, just off seventh and 26th) and was lured to this place. Shady canopies in the courtyard, wood panelled booths indoors.

The waiting staff seemed to glide around the tables with the ease of dancers. The women on the tables around me had good hair, great teeth and long lithe limbs - like they’d been stretched and sprayed with Clarins from an early age. I looked a bit scruffy for this place maybe, but no-one seemed to care.

I finally chose from the extensive brunch menu. A wide shouldered young gent floated a pretty perfect looking Eggs Bene in front of me. We exchanged smiles and he slid silently back off indoors. I like that. Not too over-familiar.

My brunch satisfied in every conceivable sense. Piping hot gooey eggs soaked into the warm blini bed. Thick Canadian bacon hit with waves of smokiness. Rich roast potatoes alternated between sweet and savoury punches, and the fresh leafy salad hit a craving for veg I’d not managed to ditch all week. And the latte – damn, New Yorkers know coffee.

A few hours later I got back to the room. My brother was watching telly. “Pass the remote will you sis?” Dutifully I did. We sat and watched trash TV, and didn’t speak for an hour. Some things never change, no matter where you are.

Rivington Grill, Shoreditch

Rivington Grill
28-30 Rivington Street
Shoreditch
EC2A
020 7729 7053
www.rivingtongrill.co.uk

by Des Ayuno

D was taking me out for a proper treat, over my protestations. “I think we need a bit of swank,” he said, but also directed me to the website, to show he’d not be forced to extend his overdraft in swank’s pursuit. Under a discreet Caprice Holdings header, it read like a Waitrose ad – Peter Gott’s bacon, Dereensillagh smoked salmon – and shared the same queasily attractive mix of aspirational luxury and corporate ruthlessness.

Come Friday morning, its spacious, linen-bedecked tables, glinting glassware and long wooden bar set a vaguely Parisian tone – as, regrettably, did the service. Winsome dark-haired waitresses ignored us completely and flirted with the only other customer, a besuited gentleman accessorised with the FT Wealth Quarterly. When they finally arrived, D’s kippers were enormous, sumptuous and utterly worth the wait. My Full English, though in its visual perfection could have illustrated Jamie’s Lovely Jubbly Best Breakfast Ever recipe, was mostly comprised of disappointing near misses. Mr Gott’s bacon tasted of very little, as did a juicy-looking sausage. A giant portion of field mushrooms and mean half tomato were caked in black pepper whose coarse texture was presumably meant to signify freshly ground but whose dusty taste indicated otherwise. Thankfully, the gloriously runny fried egg swam in puddles of delicious yellow grease and the black pudding was a crumbly, crispy joy.

I suppose I have no right to demand finely tuned culinary perfection from an Ivy outpost. And I’m sure that, on a Saturday morning, full of chatter, clinking silverware and the kind of people who aspire to a membership of Shoreditch House, the atmosphere approaches convivial. But for a posh joint whose USP is impeccable service, it’s just a bit crap. Go to the Wolseley instead.

The Breakfast Club, Islington

The Breakfast Club
31 Camden Passage
Islington
N1
020 7226 5454

by Rhys Chris Peese

Ah, the 1980s. Mass unemployment; the poll tax; the crippling of the NHS… there’s just so much to be nostalgic about. And of course John Hughes’ 1985 paean to high school conformity, The Breakfast Club. Sharing the film’s name, Islington’s branch of the Soho all-day eatery chooses to celebrate some of the more grating corners of that decade on a cork board decorated with retro vinyl: Wham, Paul Young, Madonna… and Ernie, The Fastest Milkman In The West. Surely that charted in 1971? Let’s not quibble over details.

Perhaps having heeded Poppy Tartt’s difficulties at the Soho branch, the ‘Full Monty’ breakfast takes pride of place at the head of the cartoon-themed menu. My expectations of plenitude were whetted by the oversized cup of tea, but even I, a seasoned eater of large breakfasts, was impressed by what seven quid gets you in N1.

This was the twelve inch remix of an English breakfast. The pork and leek sausages were a succulent delight, the beans a steaming orange ocean, the toast sturdy to the point of intransigence. These accompanied a mountain of hash browns, and no bland pre-formed patties, neither: this was a big old pile of fried potatoes and onions, positively rustic in the roughness of their cut. Clearly the kitchen staff enjoy cooking. But apparently they enjoy cooking some things a bit too much: the mushrooms and the bacon were overdone, and while both had an admirable richness of flavour, this was at the expense of almost any moisture.

The Breakfast Club also offers smoothies, porridge, eggs Benedict, wooden floors, mismatched furniture and internet access, although if I return it’ll be for the All American: a massive helping of eggs, pancakes, bacon and maple syrup. Because if the 1980s taught us anything, it was that ‘greed is good’.

The Lime Cafe, Harringay

The Lime Cafe
Grand Parade
Green Lanes
Harringay
N21
020 8809 4665

by Heidi Sausage

Being a veteran of Harringay's famous Cafe Lemon (I was Morcilla's mysterious dining companion), I decided to boldly go and sample the delights of the next door establishment, which has recently changed its name to The Lime Cafe, from its previous, more Italian-sounding appellation Mambocino. On first glance, it appeared as if the decor had also been completely altered, but no, the sublime fountain was still there, featuring a mermaid accompanied by dolphins and fish in variegated tones of blue and pink, and the magnificent glass dolphin sculpture had merely been moved to the top of the fridge. The nautical theme was continued with anchors and other ship parts hanging from the walls, although alas no sea shanties were to be heard, only the ubiquitous sound of Turkish pop music.

Having just spent two hours in the doctor's waiting room, I was in the mood to have my taste buds tingled, so I ordered the vegetarian set breakfast number 1, accompanied by a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. The coffee was first to arrive, and was, I am pleased to say, not instant. The orange juice was indeed freshly squeezed, and, whilst the toast was slightly on the dry side, the tomato and mushrooms were done to perfection, and the beans were not touching the (single) egg. The bubble and squeak was a bright green colour (presumably to match the waiting staff's shirts) due to the inclusion of marrowfat peas in the mix, and they rounded off this epicurean delight in a satisfying way.

Pleasantly full, I left a tip and went in search of more citrus-themed restaurants, but have so far been unsuccessful in my search.

Special Dispatch: The Penz, Innsbruck

The Penz
Adolf Pichler Platz 3
6020 Innsbruck
Austria
+43 05 12 57 56 57
www.thepenz.com

by Des Ayuno

The fön was in town, and so was I. The fön, a clammy, warm spring wind, is never far from the conversation of Austrians. It is said to send locals slightly mad – mood swings, sudden outbursts of anger or tears of frustration – an ideal time, then, for a business trip.

I rose early to fortify myself for the day ahead. A nervy woman in the glass-encased lift held her hand theatrically to her breast and sighed, “Aah, die Panorama!” as we ascended to the twelfth floor. The snowy Alps seemed metres away. I turned to the breakfast room, where full-height glass windows framed the peaks to even more dramatic effect, and whispered, “Aah, die Frühstück…” Monstrous platters of grapefruit, pineapple and strawberry squared up to the sorts of knobbly, prickly or hairy neon exotica normally seen in pictures of Vietnamese market stalls. I stopped at plate 35, not because I’d lost count but because the nervy woman was staring. The Continental contingent was as bountiful – no less than 11 kinds of breads jostled for space with perhaps 20 platters of sliced meats and cheeses, smoked fish, jams and jellies, butters and margarines, mustards, yoghurts, compotes, baskets of small pastries and dry cereals in a double row of glinting glass cylinders.

I’d ignored the “English” section, lest shrivelled sausages and flabby fried eggs shattered this dream. But upon tucking into picture-perfect plates one (fruit) and two (cakes, breads and cheeses), I had to choke back a hot tear of disappointment. Absolutely everything was several degrees too cold and tasted faintly of plastic. The fault of the fün it may have been, but despite the best efforts of Austria’s finest, I’ve never been so pleased to walk into a meeting room and see a paper plateful of cheap iced doughnuts.

Climpson & Sons, Hackney

Climpson & Sons
67 Broadway Market
Hackney
E8
020 7812 9829
www.climpsonandsons.com

by Moose Lee

The tyranny of choice: Saturday morning on Broadway Market offers a vertiginous selection of gourmand-baiting breakfast options. Luckily, M and I had already picked our destination: Climpson & Sons – one of the few unreviewed cafes on this strip of bourgeois indulgence. To get to the café, however, we had to resist a myriad of siren-strength temptation. Donning blindfolds and bunging our nostrils, we crept past gallettes, hog roasts and patisseries. Navigating by texture and sound alone, we followed the espresso machine's wail until our hands met with sanded wood.

Climpson's has a relaxed, beach-hut feel, with tables lining the pavement. The breakfast menu is not going to slay any hangovers but it is great for those self-righteous mornings when you get up early with almost no unexplained bruises. On the manager's recommendation, I went for the spicy breakfast beans with mint and lemon: black eye, kidney and butter beans mixed in herby tomato sauce on an enormous slice of toast, plus a refreshing splodge of crème fraiche. It was very good.

We were a little miffed to see that M's mackerel did not come whole: it had been torn into pieces for convenience. Thankfully, I can confirm that, even in bits, the fish tasted fantastic and was very well matched by mild horseradish and crunchy granary toast. With more than a hint of food-envy, I employed my lupine scavenging skills. On an unrelated note, M's only complaint was that her portion was too small.

Afterwards, we sat reading the paper and drinking cucumber-laden tap water for close to an hour without ordering anything. Eventually, we were asked whether we would like something more. I said: "No thanks, we're fine." The manager managed to hide his contempt admirably and for that, and other achievements, I applaud him.

Baker & Spice, Chelsea

Baker & Spice
47 Denyer Street
Chelsea
SW3
020 7589 4734

by Rhys Chris Peese

Eating out falls into two categories: meals that are familiar and comforting, and those that are aspirational. Pub grub? Familiar. Haute cuisine? Aspirational. Breakfast at Baker and Spice manages to be both.

This is how the other half breakfast. My local greasy spoon doesn’t charge ten quid for a plain omelette. Then again, my local greasy spoon doesn’t have an original Warhol print on the wall. Baker and Spice is the sort of place where you wish for one of those menus they give to women at Le Gavroche, which don’t have the prices on. Organic boiled eggs? Three fifty. Freshly squeezed organic blood orange juice? Four fifty. Organic smoked salmon omelette? Twenty nicker.

That said, the food is nearly as impressive as the prices. My pain au chocolat was glazed to a fine crunch, and was blessed with a generous wodge of rich chocolate, rather than the more familiar pair of emaciated chocolate worms that one usually finds in England. The cappuccino was the finest I’ve ever had: a robust coffee, plenty of foam, a mountain of really dark cocoa. Again, quite unlike the usual mimsiness that I’m used to. Even if my companion’s scrambled eggs were a bit too well-beaten, they were perfectly cooked with some really fresh herbs and flavoursome mushrooms.

But then there was the porridge. The texture was exactly the right meeting of bite and gloop. However, it needed to be cooked with salt, or sugar, or both, to take the edge of its natural blandness. And serving it with blueberries offended my Scots ancestry: fresh fruit and Scottish cuisine make awkward bedfellows.

Levels of pregnancy and parenthood are high in Baker and Spice, but levels of bacon are low: the cooked breakfast is only available at the weekend and eggs, pancakes and pastries are the order of the day. They wear their ethical credentials on their orange sleeves, adding ecological comfort to the well-cooked, comforting food. But one can’t help feeling that at these prices, they could be aspiring just that little bit more.

Special Dispatch: The Gastrodome, The Hay Festival

The Gastrodome
The Hay Festival 2007
Hay-on-Wye
Wales

by Blake Pudding

Do any regular readers of the LRB inwardly wince when they see a “special dispatch” review rather than an honest to God London one? I do. It just seems that they are rubbing in how often they go on holiday and to such unusual places: Tokyo, Malawi, Hastings. I think in this era of environmental self-righteousness such reviews should be banned or at least carbon offset by planting extra trees.

Anyway, talking of self-righteousness I was at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival. The weather was ghastly and I had been rudely turned away from the Green Room by Gordon Brown’s heavies. There was only one place left to go - the Gastrodome.

Amongst the general backslapping, preaching-to-the-converted smugness that surrounds Hay, this place really took the proverbial organic biscuit. Eggs were from rare breed hens and came in different colours, bread was left-leaning and the cheese was of the kind used to sabotage fox hunts in the days when such things were allowed. It was also delicious. Trying eggs this good made me realise how little flavour supermarket eggs, even free-range ones have. The only minuses were the insipid ethically produced coffee and the champagne which was organic, thin and green. As I sat there wondering how much this was going to cost, I realised that I had gate-crashed a publishers' party for Booker favourites Thomas Keneally and David Mitchell. My stomach full of delicious food and free champagne, my head full of literary conversations, I was ready to face the Welsh weather.

Queens Wood Cafe, Highgate

Queens Wood Cafe
Queens Lodge
42 Muswell Hill Road
Highgate
N10
0208 444 2604

by Stephen Fry-Up

Having spent much of the weekend on the set of forthcoming box-office smash Ciao Bella, producing the kind of viscerally physical performance for which I am justly famed, I awoke on Monday morning with an ache in every joint and the sudden remembrance that I was unemployed. ‘Twas nonetheless a fine morning: cold, and crisp, and full of muted sun. My flat-mate, “The Toaster”, and I weaved our way through battalions of wholemeal pushchairs and past the organic twattisseries of London’s Crouch End. Our destination: Queens Wood.

Or rather: the Queens Wood Café, a daintily terraced cricket-pavilion thing nestled in the North-Westerly corner of the wood just off the Muswell Hill Road. Of breakfast options there were but five: a Veggie Breakfast, a Meat Breakfast, Eggs Bennie, Oatmeal, and Organic Swiss Muesli. I chose meat and The Toaster opted for the oatmeal. Tea came in nice thick white mugs inexplicably placed onto saucers. “Mugs and saucers?” I opined, “Whatever next?” The Toaster declined to comment.

Food arrived promptly: the Toaster’s Oatmeal came with dribbly honey and soft yoghurt. It was thick and squelchy, with the perfect balance of sweet goodness and salty bite. The honey-yoghurt-oatmeal ratio (so difficult to balance in these troubled times) was also spot on. My Meat Breakfast was small but good: yolks gooed beautifully and the bacon was strong and crisp. I also allowed myself a bottle of raspberry juice: it was thick and gloopy as healthy things tend to be and it didn’t quench my thirst. But it tasted nice and sweet and provided a pleasant counterpoint to a post-prandial snout.

Two minor concluding quibbles: my toast was a bit cold, and the butter came in throw-away sachets. If one is going free-range carbon-neutral, at least do proper frickin’ butter…

Perfect Blend, Streatham

Perfect Blend
12 Streatham High Road
Streatham
SW16
020 8769 4646

by Rhys Chris Peese

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favour of bringing café society to London. However, there should be a limit to the project, and that limit is somewhere just short of the A23. Nonetheless, dotted along the busy dual carriageway of Streatham High Road, each bar and coffee shop bravely puts out its tables, ready for breakfasters to enjoy the heady exhaust fumes with their bacon.

Perfect Blend is such a venue, although my flatmate and I decided to savour the monoxide from a comfy sofa by the open window, thus affording us the chance to enjoy the tangy aroma of disinfectant as we tucked into our breakfasts: by night this is a popular bar.

I chose the full English, she the pancakes with maple syrup. Mine was cooked to near perfection: succulent bacon, a single herby sausage, mushrooms, grilled tomato, crispy wholemeal toast and, unfortunately, some tepid baked beans. The pancakes meanwhile were weighty enough to sustain one on some lengthy hike – perhaps to zone one – although I saw this as more of an advantage than my companion did. The menu seemed to be missing a trick, too, not to offer them with some more of that delicious bacon.

Perfect Blend have almost everything right. The coffee is freshly brewed; the orange juice could only be fresher if one of the waitresses squeezed it directly into your mouth at the table. The helpings are ample yet reasonably priced, the food consists of good ingredients cooked well and without fussy embellishment. Now all they need to do is petition for the pedestrianisation of Streatham High Road.

One Railways, London to Norwich

10.00 Service
One Railways
London Liverpool Street to Norwich
www.onerailway.com

by Moose Lee

In Britain, many of our most honest human interactions occur shortly after the reassuring jolt of a train halting at a points malfunction. We love the camaraderie of a hellish journey. So I feel somehow unpatriotic to bring you news of my glorious, gluttonous breakfast on a cheap, punctual train.

“The Great British” – pinnacle of One’s breakfast menu – starts with cereal. Quelle surprise, I went for muesli. It was a small portion, overly sweet and suffering a raisin drought. However, a double-bagged tea pot and proper cold OJ soon raised my spirits. After the aperitif, my bowl was cleared by a traditionally grumpy railway matron. She then brought out a basket of toast and croissants. The toast was ridiculously perfect. The croissants were a bit supermarket-y but still good. If we’re being brand conscious, this leg of the breakfast performed well: Twinings tea, President butter and Bonne Maman conserve in mini-jars, two of which I took home as souvenirs. There are few sounds more satisfying than the pop of a teeny tiny pot of stolen jam.

The matron’s grumpiness was, I propose, geographically dependent; the closer we got to Norfolk – her motherland – the more her mood lightened. By the time we hit Diss she was positively beaming.

After a short respite, the enormous Full English arrived, looking and smelling fabulous. The black pudding was a highlight: crumbly and soft. The only letdown was the clump of tasteless, over-cooked scrambled eggs sneakily concealing that most feared breakfast item: fried bread. Luckily, the restaurant was in first class, which is where I stayed for the ensuing carbohydrate paralysis.

Dedicated railway haters need not worry: there is bad news. The breakfast was on a half-price deal and would normally cost sixteen quid – more than my return train ticket - and it would take more than two stolen jam jars to make that a bargain.

Eurostar, Gare du Nord to London Waterloo

Eurostar
Gare du Nord to London Waterloo
www.eurostar.com

By Reggie Brek

Eurostar - what does it bring to mind? To this man, it conjures up a French service whose sleek little engines make quick pick-ups in London before racing back to the elegant sanctuary of the Gare du Nord. There's nothing English about it - that's why it's not called 'Anglostar'.

This being the case, I expect French standards of cooking to prevail. When I board the 8:07am from Paris to Londres, I want a Gallic wake-up call. I want flaky croissants. I want pain au chocolat so lavishly enbuttered that passing cardiologists would faint. I want a silken café crème to rinse it down my gullet. This, dammit, is the petit dejeuner I've paid £59 return for.

On being handed the menu by Mam'selle, however, the options appear to be thus: there's a continental breakfast consisting of yoghurt, ham and "soft figs" and there's something billed as Hot Cooked English Breakfast. Obviously, with figs the alternative, the only choice was the Hot Cooked.

My anguish knew no bounds when, instead of the fry-up I was expecting, I was handed a plate of omelette, tiny cubed potatoes and salmon flakes. There were approximately two tablespoons of each. There was a hard roll on a side plate, and a yoghurt, which I forced on my seatmate. The filter cafe tasted as if it had sulked in its coffeepot overnight.

Sacre bloody bleu! Up yours, Delors! Do they honestly think that Brits eat salmon at eight in the morning (otherwise known as seven, Proper English Time)? Or dry, miserly diced potato? Or a tooth-breaking rolls you could play boules with? Je suis desole. They'll be hearing from my soliciteur.

Special Dispatch: Cheers Bar, Protaras

Cheers Bar
Protaras
Nr Ayia Napa
Cyprus
Cyprus holiday paraphernalia

by Tina Beans

Ahhhhh the promise of a holiday. To escape it all, explore new lands, new cultures. Well, unless you go to Protaras of course. Like a mini Vegas with English people, Protaras has everything to offer the Brit abroad. You can eat a full roast dinner to the comforting sounds of 5 different versions of Angels by wannabe Robbies in any number of themed bars. Never been to Stonehenge? Now’s your chance! Always wanted to wonder through ‘Robin Hood Forest’? Well now you can! Don’t waste your time with real historical attractions such as Aphrodite’s Rock. As our lovely holiday rep told us ‘between you and me it’s just a rock int’ sand’.

After a night out on the cocktails and Karaoke we were in dire need of a true home comfort: a good full English. We strolled past the singing Elvis and the Sphinx and came to the Cheers Pub. For 3 Cypriot Pounds, you get all the essential ingredients, starting with a round of toast and jam as a kind of ‘starter’. The eggs were nicely done and came sitting on yet more toast, next to a helping of beans and an interesting take on grilled tomato – in slices, lightly griddled like a salad garnish. Our friendly but stressed waiter forgot the sausages which arrived a few minutes later in their own dish. Overall, it wasn’t bad with sausage and bacon of reasonably good quality, both well cooked although a little luke warm. Not the greatest breakfast, but maybe that’s what you get if you ask for a full English, in a faux American themed pub, in Cyprus.

Café Lemon, Harringay

Café Lemon
28 Grand Parade
Green Lanes
Harringay
N4
020 8800 2396

by Morcilla Black

Ah, Green Lanes — the Med of the North, with its tantalising east-meets-west frisson of gilt, chrome, novelty fountains and “ram’s reproductive organ” openly available in its healthily competitive restaurants.

But what was this I could see? A surprisingly spacious - dare I say ‘modern’ - café. What’s more, it was in the heart of Green Lanes’ best foodie drag, the stretch calling itself Grand Parade, if you don’t mind.

Breakfast starts from just £3.30 (eggs and toast and I can’t remember what else), although the abstract-expressionist mural along one wall might put the tired and emotional off their prairie oyster, deflecting their eye instead towards the sepia archive prints of Ye Olde Harringay opposite.

While my dining companion plumped for a mushroom/egg/toast combo of her own devising, I opted for the more completist ‘Full Lemon’ which, for £4.20, contained no citrus fruits of any description, but did promise all you really need on the plate plus a tea or (instant) coffee. The bacon was crisp, cooked on both sides, with nary a trace of rind. The sausage was only so-so, but the beans were piping hot, the fresh vine tomato grilled to perfection and the toast served on a side plate, to do with as you would.

Best of all was the black pudding: thinnish, peppery slices of the larger, 5cm-ish diameter sort, satisfyingly seared on both sides, and mercifully free of white, gristly lumps of dubious provenance. This left me in sanguine spirits and I was mollified further still by the discreetly-volumed background warblings of Tarkan, the renowned Turkish/German singing sensation.

With more places like this, and a little self-delusion, perhaps Green Lanes might one day approach the self-consciously chi-chi ambience of nearby Crouch End. Although possibly not in our lifetimes.

Subway, Anywhere

Subway
Anywhere
www.subway.co.uk

by Reggie Brek

It has always been a matter of perverse pride that my taste in food inclines naturally toward the lowbrow. Offered a choice, as I once was on my birthday, between the Wolseley and KFC, I went for the Colonel, and had one of the most gratifying meals of that year. It's nothing to do with reverse snobbishness or anything like that; I just have the palate of a 10-year-old.

Thus, I'm exactly the chow-down type the Subway chain had in mind when they designed their breakfast menu. Already a slave to the perfect rhythm of the McDonald's Big Breakfast, I was very much looking forward to trying Subway's interpretation of the morning meal. A recent-ish arrival from America, specialising in sandwiches on long rolls (including, to my delight, a 12-inch version), it was bound to give the Big Brekko a run for its money.

Well, my hopes foundered as soon as I walked in. Get this - the New York subway map imprinted on the walls was wrong. Parts of it had been transposed to place Brooklyn across the East River from Queens. If they could make so free with the map, whose design is as comforting to New Yorkers as Harry Beck's Underground effort is to Londoners, who knew what they could do to the Breakfast Mega 6-Inch Sub?

I found out. Repairing to a stool with my Mega and a refillable Diet Coke - a sexier bet than the coffee, I thought - I made my way through a mulch of bacon, sausage, egg and Swiss cheese. Now remember, I love this kind of thing, so to me it was an agreeable mulch, but if I were to be critical, I'd mention the pre-formed scrambled eggs, the spicy circle that is probably legally required to be labelled "sausage food" and the weird granules stuck to the roll. I enjoyed it. Proper adults might not.

Fernandez & Wells, Soho

Fernandez & Wells
73 Beak Street
Soho
020 7734 1546

by Armand Croissant

Brightness, cleanliness: the polish of light wood, the glint of light from the coffee machine, the low murmur of awakening media types. Open, airy, the breakfasting half of Fernandez & Wells is as welcome as a half-bottle of flat coke to a hungover student – sweet, refreshing, life-saving. Oh, I could rhapsodise about the friendly staff, the glass of water placed – unasked - reverently and carefully beside the brimming, white perfection of the latte; the puffy, slightly sugary taste of the croissant. But instead I choose as my poetic theme the black pudding and egg mayonnaise sandwich. Oh gods, who have banished the black pudding from the ordinary breakfast table, why hast thou done such a thing? A light, biscuity roll, slightly toasted, with just enough creamy egg and two slices of the black stuff; such a sandwich might have graced the plates of decadent, syphilis-struck Spanish dons, exiled to the sweltering madness of Mexico.

And what is more is that Fernandez & Wells have a lunch place too, on Lexington Street, which in the evening transforms itself into a wine shop. Although the prices slightly creep towards the expensive, it is worth it, and after going there one can never quite face the stodgy horror of Pret a Manger again. Which is bad for the coffers, but good for the soul, and as everyone knows, there is no wealth anyway but the wealth of the soul.

Giraffe, Spitalfields

Giraffe
1 Crispin Place
Spitalfields
E1
0203 116 2000
www.giraffe.net

by Dr Sigmund Fried

Due to the previous night's celebration of my passage into the wasteland of my thirties, a sunny Sunday afternoon found me wandering around Spitalfields with a hangover that felt as if someone had stolen my brain and replaced it with a sponge cake full of woodpeckers.

At 30, everything is the same; nothing has changed. The crossover into a new consumer survey demographic has not yielded the maturity that I was anticipating. Proof of this possibly interminable idiocy - that I fear I must now endure until I bugger off of this mortal coil - was having breakfast at Giraffe, an establishment that I have always believed to be the culinary equivalent of Paul Simon's Graceland: mawkish, misguided, and disingenuously naive. (Here's an 'about us' sampler from the website: "Back at the end of last century, Russel Joffe asked himself 'what animal has the biggest heart in the world?' and all of a sudden, Giraffe was born'". Seriously though, what a load of old toss.)

However, with Ed benedict in tow and a definite desire not be in the muculent, claustrophobic environs of the Sunday market proper, compounded by the very real possibility of passing out due to dehydration and hunger, Giraffe it was.

Despite it pushing 4 o'clock I decided to go for the 'Good Morning Brekkie!' (£5.50), simply because it was one of the first things on the menu and I was rapidly losing the ability to read. It was a catastrophic mistake. The scrambled eggs were an insipid, gelatinous lump; the bacon bland and brittle; the toast inexplicably unbuttered, and the baked beans algid.

My esteemed editor assures me that he has had a satisfactory breakfast at Giraffe on more than one occasion, so I guess the joke's on me. What an old twat.

Special Dispatch: Cora's, Montreal

Cora's
3465, Ave. du Parc, Montreal
H2X 2H6
Canada
www.chezcora.com

Excerpt from Leonard Cohen’s Stranger Breakfasts: Selected Writings, edited by Poppy Tartt

Suzanne takes you down to a place by the river; you can’t hear the boats go by because it’s not really near the river, that’s just a rhetorical device; and you know she’s half-crazy, she wants to feed you tea and oranges – among other foods. Suzanne takes your hand and leads you into Cora’s; the sun does not pour down like honey because it’s winter and it’s so cold you don’t feel comfortable outside unless you’re wearing a special suit made of arctic sleeping bags and a fur-lined mask with plastic see-through globes to protect your eyeballs from freezing. You can’t hear the boats go by.

You queue for a while. ‘Come over to the window my little darlings,’ says the waitress. On the walls there are many brightly-coloured bubble drawings of different meals. The menu is like a children’s party invitation. ‘This is funny,’ you tell Suzanne.

She is wearing rags and feathers – or a coat, probably. She says: ‘I told you when we came it would be strange’. Like any eater you are looking for the dish that is so fine and wild you’ll never need to eat another. At least not until later. Pancakes, bacon, sausage and eggs. Comes with fruit. On the same dish. In Montreal, this is standard. We laugh and cry about it all. They arrive, breakfasts deep and warm; eggs on the plate like a sleepy golden storm. Suzanne agrees: ‘But let’s not talk of oranges or melons or things we can’t combine.’

God no. Suzanne, thanks for the fruit you took from my plate; I thought it was there for good, so I never tried. I certainly would never have eaten it, all smeary with egg slime. When you eat like this you don’t know what’s for afters.