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.